Dawn’s Thoughts

Henry Peterson bent down to examine a crack in the sidewalk. He hardly glanced at the woman passing by, a woman with too-tall legs and too-long tongue, and a narrow, pinched face. Everyone knew about those people. They were built all wrong, God’s special children, and it was said in the best circles that they thought they were meant to rule the world. Perhaps, in the past, they had. But things were different now.Henry’s nursemaid had told him all about them before she died of a heart defect. Henry hadn’t shed any tears for her, but that was all right. Others howled when their people died, faces contorted and snot dripping from their nose. Henry simply sat quietly and went about his business the next day as normal. He missed her, of course, though missing someone didn’t bring them back from the dead. The preacher, a cold, thin man, told Henry that she was in Heaven. What a strange concept? What was Heaven? Why should it matter?

“She’s in the ground, now,” Henry said, smiling. The preacher only stared at him. He didn’t dispute the matter. What was the use? The idiots and mongoloids had taken over the world. There were lunch breaks whenever you wanted, so you could stare at things, play with cars or walk about with strangers. A new slang had developed. It was an oddly garbled speech that the preacher didn’t like at all. People went about grimacing, hooting and perching like birds. The new generation had strange ways, but no one argued with it. After all, there was free health care and good money and no theft, for you can’t steal if everything is shared.

The day would have been Wednesday. If Wednesday still existed. But every schoolchild knew that Wednesday had been abolished because great King Henry, the Henry of this story, disliked it immensely. And what was the good of being king if you couldn’t mess about with things? After all, Wednesday was a horrible sounding day, and the king refused even to speak its name.

You are probably wondering just how Henry became king in the first place. Well, after the death of Henry’s mother, Queen Petunia the Fifth, who was indeed one of the too-long people, Henry was appointed king. This did not happen without a struggle, for people opposed Henry as if he had been a tyrant. The fact that he was, at the time, a drooling, crying baby did not make any difference. Henry could not be king. He should be hidden away, quite properly, where the public would soon forget about him, and focus on the scandals and drunken brawls of the rest of the royal family. Of course, this is the proper thing to do.

You see, Henry’s tongue was thick, his eyelids folded, his smile a wide grin.

“A king shouldn’t grin like that,” said the royal dentist, sounded shocked. “How improper!”

“A king shouldn’t look that way,” said the royal footman, sneezing so loud that a flock of crows flew off immediately in the next county.

“A king,” exclaimed the cold preacher severely, “should be someone the public can look up to. Not the royal idiot!”

Well, the Royal Idiot soon grew a little. Henry was a kind child and unselfish in the best sense of the word, but no one could see this. They had debated sending him away, and there was truly no one to prevent it. Except the nursemaid, who had, once upon a time, had a younger brother like Henry. The nursemaid, only a girl herself, pitched such a fit that three doctors had to be called, and three security guards, and a half-dozen stiff-necked biddies to shame her. It did no good. The nursemaid smacked them all, and sent them away howling.

So, in the end, Henry stayed. He made his first wish when he was three. “What would you like to do if you could do anything?” asked the nursemaid.

“Fly a kite,” said Henry.

So a law was made. Wednesday – it hadn’t yet been banned – became the day where everyone had fly kites, even if they were sick in bed, even if their feet hurt. Because of course, you can fly a kite lying down on a good hill.

Of course, the older generation complained about this new law, Prop 1234, as if it meant to destroy the world. What good would it do to go about wasting time every Wednesday flying kites? They swore that Henry was a tyrant, and they might even have gone up to replace him, if it hadn’t been for the nursemaid. How she could bite!

Henry didn’t even know he’d made a law. He dug trenches outside in the royal backyard to make cities for his toy backhoe instead of worrying about that. One night, when the nursemaid read him Winnie-the-Pooh, Henry decreed that a forest should be created, as grand and wonderful as Christopher Robin’s. Well, the developers sighed and grumbled, but a job was a job, so, in the end, the largest high rise in town was selected for demolition. Henry put in slides, a petting zoo, and twelve swings, including one which would swing you upside down and from side to side if you wanted, because sometimes Henry felt better rocked from side to side.

And then one day, when Henry was thirteen, a war broke out. It was between the people of Lalaland and Gotobed. Lalaland’s people wanted a shopping mall built – oh, and a minutare golf course as well. Someone had ordered the clubs, but they didn’t have any balls. This meant they had to go about swinging clubs without actually hitting anything, which they felt was very inconvinent, and made them feel like bloody fools in the bargain. The people of Gotobed didn’t give a hoot about this, as they never had any visitors. They ate nothing but stinky cheese all day long, which made a gigantic cloud of stinky-cheese-bits hover over Gotobed. The Gotobedians never slept, naturally, because when their king, Prince Aloysisus, was very small, he said he was never going to bed ever ever again. Naturally, this made his people very cranky, and so they declared war whenever they could. They took over other people’s countries and swore they would shower the great cloud of stinky-cheese-bits over anyone who opposed them.

Gotobed tried to take over Lalaland. They breathed into everyone’s face until they coughed. The Lalalandians, meanawhile, armed with their miniature golf clubs, had marched off to war, beating the holy snot out of the enemy.

Well, Henry heard about this over dinner one night. It distressed him. He pestered his nurse for questions about Gotobed and Lalaland. The concept of the two groups disagreeing so earnestly did not get through to him.

“But why?” good king Henry asked, picking his royal nose thoughtfully.

“They want a shopping mall and golf course,” said his nursemaid, peevishly.

“Why don’t they build one?”

“They have an aversion to hammers.”

Henry nodded. He had an averision to hammers. And red things. And his great aunt’s scratchy whiskers when she kissed him. And brussell sprouts, which he decided he’d better outlaw immediately. People would thank him. Perhaps they would have a No Brussell Sprouts Day in his honor.

He realized that his nurse was saying something. Henry was too interested in how his knife and fork clanged together to listen. They made a nice rhythmic sound.

“Henry!” screeched the nurse, “Haven’t you been listening to me?”

“Yes.”

“I was saying that you ought to go to war too.”

Henry frowned. His small nose wrinkled. “I don’t think I like war,” he said.

“You just haven’t tried it yet. Try it first and then come back and tell me if it’s stupid.”

Henry considered this. “I think,” Henry said, “I think that I want more jam, please.”
“You can’t send that Royal Idiot out to war,” exclaimed the royal preacher when he heard.

“Why not?” replied the nurse. “Other countries have. Why, just last week…”

“His Royal Highness’ head will be blown right off his shoulders!” shouted the preacher. “Little bits of him will be scattered all throughout the countryside.”

“Look,” said the nurse, losing her temper. “Henry is a good, kind boy…”

“Oh, here you go with that again,” snapped the first sergerant of the army.

The nursemaid turned. “Excuse me. This is a private conversation. What are you doing here?”

“Madam, I appear everywhere I’m not wanted, thank you very much.”

“You’re an idiot,” said the nurse.

The first sergerant looked confused. “I thought the boy was an idiot.”

The nursemaid huffed. The preacher argued morality. The first sergeant ignored them both and played chess with the royal minister of health, who had the flu. At last, it was agreed that Henry would go off to war, carrying a sack of potatoes.

Why potatoes? Well, no one was quite sure, they only knew that people generally carry important things on travels like this, and Henry had nothing adventurous to bring. He bundled up a pack with fifty-seven red potatoes, a jug of orange juice, his vitamins from the minister of health, his teddy bear, and twenty-one shopping catalogs to appease the Lalalandians.

“What will use the potatoes for?” asked the nursemaid.

“Golf balls,” Henry told her. “I’ll scatter them around so the Lalalandians have something to hit with their clubs.”

The nurse smiled and brushed away a tear. “You’re a clever boy.”

“I know,” Henry said.

Then he picked up his sack with the potatoes, orange juice, vitamins, catalogs and the teddy bear head sticking out of the top, and set out for an adventure. The minister of the army went along with him, swaggering a little. The minister of the army loved a good swagger and had put years of practice into his. It helped in a complete surrender if your enemy knew you would win.

“So, Henry,” said the first sergeant, “what will you do with the Gotobedians?”

Henry stopped. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Well, you’d better. They have stinky cheese. We need to come up with a plan. They’re dangerous.”

“What about the Lalalandians?”

“They’re even more dangerous. They have three thousand women with PMS wanted to shop for shoes. Who do you think beats the holy snot out of the enemy?”
Henry put his sack down against a tree. He took out his teddy bear and set that against the tree as well. “Sergeant, do they really beat the snot out of them?”

The man laughed and Henry felt better. Perhaps this was all a big joke. He could feed his teddy bear and go home to his royal forest. “You see that mountain up ahead?” The sergeant pointed a knobbly finger at a dark murky shape in a distance.

“Of course.”

“Well,” whispered the first sergeant confidentially.”That’s what remains of the people once the Lalalandians get hold of them.”

Henry paled. “You don’t mean,” he stammered. “it can’t be.”

“Yes,” hissed the man. He stretched his arms out wide as they could go. “That’s the Great Snot Mountains.”

The Great Snot Mountains are ever-changing, of course. They were created because all the snot people picked from their noses needed somewhere to go. It gravitated to that one particular spot as if there was a magnet underneath it. And that is why you never ever see any of the snot you pick ever again. It automatically finds its way to the mountains. In fact, if you have very sharp eyes, and a slow motion camera, you might even be able to see it zipping along. Your grandfather may in fact have such a picture, but chances are you will never see it because the Great Snot Mountains are one of the world’s best kept secrets. That’s why you never hear anyone mention where snot falls.

Henry, like most good children, was always resourceful. He thought for a moment. The sergeant most likely believed Henry was going to complain about passing through the mountains, but instead all Henry said was, “Do you have a sled?”

“Why?”

“I want to go sledding in the mountains.”

“Good Lord,” snapped the Sergeant. “We can’t even go to war for five minutes without you wanted to have a vacation. Now be quiet!”

Henry decided he would much rather go sledding than go to war, but of course he didn’t have much choice. The sergeant ate lunch and fell asleep with his stomach growling and popping, just as if a quite small duck had been trapped inside. Henry sat there thinking for some time, only the first sergeant’s noises were very boring and there was nothing to do. He had drank some orange juice, and poured some on the ground for the butterflies because they weren’t taking naps and had had lunch with him. He fed his teddy bear, pitched vitamins about like marbles, and folded five of the twenty-one catalogs into hats, boats and pinwheels. Then he got really bored and began to wonder if perhaps the first sergeant would be angry when he discovered the catalogs. They certainly weren’t in gift-giving condition anymore.

He picked up all the vitamins and catalogs and placed them back in his sack, whistling quietly to himself. Dragging his teddy bear by the hand, he left the first sergeant under the tree, sound asleep, and turned down the path toward the Great Snot Mountains.
At the first bend in the path, he met an old woman. She was ancient and bent over and there was hair sticking under her nose like the tusks on a boar. She was very ugly.

Henry was a polite boy. “Good morning,” said Henry politely. “You’re very ugly.”

The old woman beckoned him with her finger. “Have you run away?” she asked.

Perhaps she would invite him in for tea and cake. Of course he was hungry. “Oh, yes. I’ve had nothing to eat but orange juice.”

“Good. Now shove off.”

“But, but, you’re supposed to be kind to me.”

The old woman nodded and sighed. “It’s true. But if you say it’s because you’re the king, I’ll have your head. I think you’re a horrid little boy.” And she stuck her tongue out at him.

Henry had a tongue too, every bit as good as the old woman’s, if not better, because his wasn’t liver-colored. He showed it to her. She howled something at him and would have vanished entirely into the under brush if Henry hadn’t shrieked at her, “I have potatoes!”

Now Henry was supposed to save these for the golf-crazy Lalalandians but after all, shopping catalogs should be enough for them. He had nothing for the Gotobedians and didn’t want a cheese cloud overhead if he could help it. The old woman loved potatoes, loved anything, in fact, which could be stored in a bathtub.

“What an odd place to put potatoes!” Henry babbled as he and the old woman entered her hut in the river weeds. “Are you a witch?”

“Not always,” snapped the old woman. “I just get a little drunk on Saturday nights and do things I regret in the morning.”

“Doesn’t your mother have a place to put potatoes? I have to appease the Gotobedians. They haven’t slept in sixty years and they dismember anyone who passes them.”

“Use my magic potion. It’ll make them so drunk they won’t be able to a war.”

“All right, thank you very much.”

And Henry gave half the potatoes to the old woman, slept under her kitchen table that night, and woke up the next morning to find the old woman stirring the potatoes in the bathtub. When they were done, he put them in pickle jars and bound them to his sack with rope. He set out again, waving to the old woman.

After several more miles his feet hurt terribly and he wanted to swing in his forest that was so much like Winnie-the-Pooh’s. And it was then that he met the rabbit. It was as tall as a small child and bright neon green. The rabbit eyed him curiously, had a coughing fit, and gagged.

“What have you been smoking?” it squeaked.

Henry stared after it, puzzled. “I haven’t. I don’t like to smoke.”

“Well, I do. I’m a six-carton man, myself. I was hoping to bum a cigarette.”

“Well, sorry.”

“You’re no fun at all,” said the rabbit. “I don’t have anywhere to be and you didn’t even  –“

“Excuse me,” Henry said politely. “Which way is the war?”

The rabbit shrugged. Off in the distance Henry could hear sounds – war whoops and guttural cries, banging and great thumping sounds and “Fore!” — which he supposed was what the Lalalandians yelled. And sure enough, little pieces of snot zipped right under his feet and the ground got a little thicker. “That way,” the rabbit said, deadpan.

“Thank you!” Henry called back. He ran toward the war. It was Wednesday, his least favorite day and he had nothing to fly a kite with except his sack. He set it down and emptied it, folding twelve of the catalogs into kites, tied with the minister of health’s dental floss. He strapped the potatoes on one kite, the magic potion on several more, and a carton of green rabbit’s cigarettes to the other. The green rabbit had not allowed this, but it was for a good cause. The kites flew up easily into the battle field. For a time, there was nothing but the shouting and cursing that had gone on before.

Soon enough, however, when Henry climbed the hill, he found the Lalandians running about, batting at the potatoes with the golf clubs. The other half browsed shopping catalogs, humming contentedly about shoe sales and big screen TVs. The Gotobedians, meanwhile, had become royally intoxicated and were reeling about, smoking and drinking and carrying on. Their war whoops continued, but their stinky cheese machine sat there quietly, belching out a wave of cheese smell every so often but otherwise silent. After quite some time, the Lalandians marched off in search of the nearest shopping mall they did not need to build, and the Gotobedians had fallen asleep, snoring as badly as the first sergeant.

Henry smiled. “My work here is done,” he said, and then he ran down the Great Snot Mountains, trailing the sack behind him like a cape, waving his arms like an airplane, whooping and hollering like the great clever Royal Idiot he really was.

Copyright Dawn Wood October 2008

Copyright Dawn Wood 2008

People are always telling me strange things. I was four when Da left, five when Mam told me I was leaving too. But the time I remember best is when Charlie McCarthy swore on his mother’s grave that Mr. Asher chopped up people’s brains in the basement.

“People brains?” I whispered. I glanced around. Benches lined the day room, and we lined the benches. Only one faced the window. If an attendant heard you talking, well, that’d be the end of you. There’d come someone with the belt, or keys, or worse, the Dog Collar. Shock the bejesus out of you, like a hundred beestings. Charlie McCarthy knew things. The rest of us, God above, didn’t dare move most of the time. Half couldn’t, being crippled in various ways, or not having sense enough. Some were only there, we figured, because we were poor, or Irish like me, or hicks. The adults who didn’t babble remembered trips here. One of them told me this was St. James’ School for the Feebleminded.

“Yeah,” Charlie said excitedly. Lines of spit wobbled out of his mouth. I suppose Charlie looked like everyone, in knickers and grey regulation coat. Only thing different about him was he was thinner and yellow- eyed.  “Slice ‘em up. Stare at ‘em.”

“Why?” I whispered.

Charlie shrugged. “Dunno. Folks here are nuts.”

We tried to stifle it, but waves of giggles came over us. Naturally we both got a beating, but we were laughing too hard to care.

I lay in the bed next to Charlie’s and tried to sleep. All day I pretended I was a tree so I wouldn’t twitch on the benches. During training, if I stopped putting washers in holes, or paused to think, I had the strap because I wasn’t moving. Then I couldn’t sleep, and come morning I was jumpy and had to be a tree even harder.

“Charlie?”

“Mmmfh.”

“How old am I?”

“How should I know? You think I’m God?”

I knew how old I was when I left home, only years muddled up. With Mam, I had birthdays. Now nothing except Sundays to mark the time.

“You’re around ten. You came when I…” He paused. “I got sick in the winter.”

I remembered. He’d thrown up all over and been carted away. “What’s my name?”

“Jeez-um-crow. What do the attendants call you?”

I thought for a minute, then beamed. “Idiot!”

“Aw, God, you must be. They call you James, don’t they?”

Maybe I was named after St. Jim’s School. Kids called me Jim. But then, they only called Charlie that because his name really was McCarthy, and because he was small, and yellow, like the dummy someone’s old man bought them for Christmas, years ago, from the five and dime. That boy was lucky. He thought us odd because we relished details. Mam took me to a store like that, colored lights and train sets. I wanted to dream about it.

The bell sounded next morning. Everyone filed into the dining room to eat sticky oatmeal. I didn’t like mornings. Old, young, calm and crazy. Old coots spilled milk and occasionally someone else slid past and threatened to cut your throat. Flies, well fed from oatmeal leavings and bandages, swarmed about. The heater worked, and we fried, or it didn’t, and we froze our backsides off. One of the boys told us his old man had a radio and telephone. We jeered him for being rich. G’wan, tell us another one. Then Charlie trumped them all, with his tale of people brains in the basement.

“You shouldn’t tell stories like that,” someone said. Mr. Asher, who chopped brains, stood just behind Charlie. Charlie paled. Spit lolled out of his mouth, and he rubbed his jaw reflexively. I knew then he was scared. He mumbled something. We all stared at Mr. Asher. Attendants were kind or not. In a hurry. Everyone knew Mr. Asher. I don’t know why. He lurched about in a white coat; without it he might have been one of us. People said he had a bad leg from polio. The bottom of a brace showed by his shoes. Maybe Charlie would be yanked up by the ears. I waited.

Mr. Asher followed my gaze to his leg. Now I was in for it. He only said, “Talk about something else,” and left. That was very strange.

“Follow him,” Charlie whispered out of the corner of his mouth. I hesitated, got up, tried to act as if I desperately needed to pee, and promptly ran into Mrs. Sullivan by the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Pee!” I gasped, popeyed.

Grimacing, Mrs. Sullivan let me go, admonishing me for a heathen. My shoes thudded loudly in the hallway. Ahead, I saw Mr. Asher’s back, and crept along. Sometimes I thought he saw me. He gave no sign of it. Most attendants were still milling about at breakfast. At last Mr. Asher turned at one of the locked doors and went in. I followed, for the door didn’t shut. Lit by a single swaying light bulb, the stairway threw patterns against the wall, and I began to worry about my shadow.

The room below sparkled with cleanliness. In contrast to the dark wainscoted walls above, this white room was silent. A table with a sheet over it lay in the center, and beyond that, a cabinet and sink. I smiled. I forgot my loud shoes, curious about the faucet. We got our showers naked, sixty together, with thick hoses. When I turned the knobs, water ran between my fingers. It felt wonderful. This place was quiet and peaceful. The way I imagined outside would be.

“What are you doing here?” Mr. Asher shouted.

I spun around, forcing the knobs further. Clouds of steam rose. Stupidly, I swatted with my hands, useless with panic. My cropped hair burned fiercely. I became aware of a radio close by. Mr. Asher pushed me aside and turned off the water.

This broke something inside me. “Don’t carve up my brains!” I wailed. “I like my brains!”

Mr. Asher reminded me, loudly, of my place here. Then, too, Ward F, for crazy folks, a lobotomy, electric shock. Perhaps I needed the Dog Collar. I insisted I didn’t. Mr. Asher said I’d better be gone. I nodded wildly. “Yes,” I said, “Yes, I think so.”

I willed myself not to run and backed toward the door. Mr. Asher now paid no attention to me, seemed unaware that I crouched just inside the stairway. Heaven knows what possessed me. He uncovered the sheeted table to reveal a clay doll, eyes purplish and filmy, mouth agape. There was no need to cover it up, I thought, though it troubled me. The doll had floppy arms, the same lice-resistant haircut we all had. Mr. Asher hummed, fiddling here and there. I shut my eyes and tried to stop breathing. What would they do to me for this? My knees trembled, and at last, hazily, I became aware of Mr. Asher lifting the doll, a child, and carting it out a back door, wrapped tightly in a sheet.

When he had been gone for sometime, I gritted my teeth and fled out the same door, a stupid move, as he might just have easily come back in. But outside was deserted, the asphalt radiating heat. Maybe he had dumped the child into the outhouse. Well, maybe not; it was too large. I was numb with tiredness, but a strange eagerness pulsed through me. It frightened me. I roamed the large empty yard, marveling at dirt clods and sunlight and thick gray sow bugs. AUTO, I wrote in the dirt. The word on Mr. Asher’s door. Then I scratched it out, because they would know who’d been here. I could read and write a bit. What I needed was reading material. In the dumpster, the attendants might have thrown away newspaper. I loved them. I hoarded them, spelling out the words Mam had taught me. There was no school here other than training, and no one bothered with literacy. I hauled myself up on the lip of the dumpster, and pried open the lid, stuffing fistfuls of typewritten papers into my pockets, pants, under my shirt, around my waist like an extra coat.

There, of course, lay the wrapped sheet.

I shook so hard that I fell off the dumpster. I wrapped my arms around my knees, shivering, wet with sweat. That boy was dead. Mr. Asher had killed him.

Charlie wisely left me alone after that, didn’t ask what happened. Kids got that numbness, drifting, and you left them alone because it passed the time. Passing time was all-important at St. Jim’s. I didn’t even try to get back into the ward, lost all self-preservation, in fact. Mrs. Sullivan found me. Surprisingly, I didn’t get the strap, Dog Collar, or any of the other various punishments. I had had a fit, they said, and was led back to my place on the bench. Ah, God, don’t you wish all children had fits, said Mrs. Sullivan. Keeps them docile, not twitching idiots like this great bunch here.

When we undressed for bed, Charlie whispered to me, “Was it bad?”

I only stood there. Charlie helped me out of my clothes, but froze when he saw the papers stuffed them. He was always surly whenever I traced words into the dusty floor. “You don’t understand that,” he’d cried, and stepped on my fingers. I’d learned to read. If I had special privileges I might go outside next. Outside, and everyone’s old worn out stories about it, seemed less important. I’d seen outside. It lay in the dumpster.

Charlie’s eyes gleamed at the sight of so much material this time, though. He made me get under the covers, then slid the papers out where no one could see. He looked desperately for a place to stash them, finally tucking them beneath the mattress. We didn’t have any possessions. He whispered, “Dog Collar?”

“No.”

“Lights out!” boomed someone’s voice from the thin patch of light in the doorway. Charlie crawled underneath his own blanket and said something. I wish I could remember what it was. Instead, I remember Charlie. He grew more yellow after that. At night I counted his breathing.

Mrs. Sullivan called me into the superintendent’s office one morning. A woman sat quietly on the bench by the door. I paid little attention to her. She stared at me and twisted her battered hat.

Mrs. Sullivan said, “James, this is your mother, come to take you home.”

Mam? Well, I suppose she looked like Mam. Oh, some folks had visitors, but no one was allowed in the dorms, and no one visited me.

“You have demonstrated you can be released.” Mrs. Sullivan told me.

It wasn’t clear how I’d demonstrated that. “What about Charlie?” I asked. Fear gripped my belly. I couldn’t leave Charlie. “Charlie McCarthy.”

“Learn to get along without you, I suppose,” Mrs. Sullivan replied sharply. I took the bundle she gave, and then Mam’s hand. We walked straight out the front doors. Mam hugged me. She carried me to the car like a baby. Very strange. I stared out the window until my eyes ached. It was my first time in a car.

Mam said, “I don’t know. First they take you away and, I don’t know, we’re poor, and we’re Irish, and your Da being – the way he was – maybe it – but surely, they can’t take children away for nothing. And what changed? Nothing! And here you are.”

“Sorry, Mam,” I said. I hadn’t a clue. She patted my shoulder.

“Don’t mind me, baby. You just get settled in.”

I tried. A shabby apartment, with my own room, so quiet my ears hurt. And Mam listened to the radio every night. It was wonderful. I searched for the Dog Collar, so I’d be ready if Mam shocked me, but I never did find it. Sometimes she sang. I went to school, and never complained about it, though they had no patience with my slowness, inherited from St. Jim’s. I never got the strap, and kids stayed outside until dinner. I was happy, but I missed Charlie.

It didn’t matter what I did. I went out shopping, wondering at carrots, balls, thick coats, board games, and coffee, which Mam let me taste. Everywhere, children gathered, unrestrained and obnoxious, saying things that would surely have earned them a lobotomy at St. Jim’s. They spoke, cussed, shoved, chased each other, demanded things, and found every opportunity to make nusiences of themselves. The sixty of us in our ward wouldn’t have dreamed of that. “St. Jim’s brat,” they cried. “Idjit!”

Mam took a broom after them once, apron flying about her, chasing after them down the road until they scattered, squawking like birds. I loved Mam. I told her about Charlie sometimes, and one night, I took out my little bundle from St. Jim’s and unpacked it.

The papers from the dumpster fell out. I had no clue how they’d gotten there. Tears filled my eyes. “Jim, honey,” Mam said, “What is it?”
“Reading,” I gulped. The papers, stained with spoiled food and dirt, spilled over the floor. I picked up the first one, pinching at my eyebrows, hoping that I could will my brain to understand it.

“Auto,” I said.

“Is it about cars?” Mam asked, ironing away. She took in washing, so that steam always curled her hair and made her red-faced. The hot smell floated up, and I thought this must be what good things are like.

I read silently, fingering words, mouthing them. Timothy. Aged nine. Dead. Liver—

“Mam, what’s this word?”

“Failure, Jim.” Mam said, without paying much attention.

Liver failure. The same with the rest of the papers. Everyone had died of liver failure. Given hepatitis August 5^th, worsened steadily.

What did that mean? I had no time to wonder, since Mam prodded me and made me put the papers away. “Go out and play,” she said. “You always stay in.”

That wasn’t so. I loved outside and spent most days out, but inside I became once again, the docile child who survived St. Jim’s School. I put the papers back in their bag again, went outside to play kick-the-can as best I could. Mothers and fathers gathered outside too, smoking and standing about chatting. I eyed them as though they were a foreign culture. Parents were never allowed in the dorms, so it was rather a shock to see hordes of grown people, and I used to stare at them as if they were animals in the zoo. Charlie McCarthy wouldn’t have done that. He’d have snuck up behind a proper mother or absentminded father and raised holy terror. I watched their hellos and goodbyes closely, looking for clues.

“I’ve been reading, I said, and they turned to look at me, surprised I could read. “Mam doesn’t have a Dog Collar.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Mrs. Geller next door said, “since you don’t have a dog.”

“Where I come from,” I said, “people keep dying of liver failure.”

Well, that stirred things up a bit. The women gawked at me, and the fathers looked up their papers as if I had shouted a bad word into the street. Mrs. Geller said, “Children don’t die of liver failure,” and Mrs. McCann demanded, “Are you trying to be funny, James?”
“No,” I said. At St. Jim’s, people talked mainly after Lights Out, but here they did things differently, gathering out on the street, talking aimlessly. Maybe they didn’t save their troubles and good things for these times. Then when did they tell them?

“But they are,” I continued doggedly, “they give it to the ones no one will miss.”

Talk stopped entirely. Puzzled, I looked about, frowning. Kids should be used to death like I was. Well, in the dumpster was one thing, but people at St. James often died, and like fits, attendants looked upon these times as work relief. We didn’t, of course, but who listened to us?

“James!” someone was shouting. “Get in here this instant! Honestly, why don’t you act like a normal child?”

I turned quickly. Mam stood on the steps, her wet hair in a brushy mess, her arms splotchy with contained rage. Like a defeated soldier, I marched back home, opening doors slowly, and sat at my place at the table. I felt nothing. I was as numb as I had been stumbling about outside for the first time. The controlled group, the papers said. Sure, I knew what that meant. The strap controlled things. Boys on the street shouted, “Why don’t you act normal?” Now I knew. The normal group.

Mam stormed in a minute later, wrenching her scarf and staring at me like you would a foreigner. “Honestly, James. What am I going to do with you?”

I swallowed and rattled it off from memory. “The strap,” I said. “the crazy ward, a lobotomy, the Dog Collar, electric shock…” I went on, but Mam was no longer listening. She stared wide-eyed at me, and I thought she would have me leave. “See, that’s it,” she said. “They took my sweet little boy. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Where do you get these things?”

Act normal. Well, playacting normal could take years. I looked at her in confusion. I was acting normal, it was everything else that had changed.

I laid my head down on the kitchen table. Its surface felt smooth and cool. I knew the story of how they had come for me. Mam told me. Of course, neighbors, friends and grocers would be quick enough to give advice about St. James’, but I was different. People came in the middle of the night and pried me away from Mam. Surely that had to make a difference, didn’t it?

I felt Mam brush past me. Her letters made no difference, she’d said. Not writing or coming by, for no one knew where I’d been sent. And here I was. If no one else had a use for me, maybe Mam did. “Mam,” I whispered. “How old am I?”

“You’re thirteen, sweetheart,” Mam told me.

Once, I kept walking, for the joy of it, and got turned about. When the policeman came he had a club and I began to cry.

“Hang on, brother,” he said, “Where did you come from?”

“St. Jim’s School.” I said. The only address I knew.

Surprising how ancient the building looked from outside, brick, forbidding, with a long driveway. Mrs. Sullivan muttered at how I turned up, like a bad penny she said, and sent me upstairs to the dorms to wait for Mam.

The boys all sat on the benches, as before. Maybe Mam would not know which one was me. Then, she wouldn’t be allowed here. “I get to stay outside and listen to the radio all day, if I want,” I told the boy proudly. “I can read a bit more.”

The boy only stared at me apathetically, and I knew he was passing time.

“Charlie McCarthy,” I whispered.

“Why do they call him Charlie McCarthy?” the boy whispered back, as though he already knew.

My tongue tasted sour. “Because he’s thin and yellow,” I said.

Something clicked into place inside my head. I sprang to my feet and actually ran down the long rows of benches. Behind me, the attendant shouted and ran after me, but I moved like the wind. I ran until my lungs hurt, until I reached my bed.

I stopped, actually skidded. Another doll lay on the bed next to mine. Rubbery skin, cropped hair, a closed mouth this time. Yellow eyes. Mr. Asher nodded curtly to me, lifting the boy off the bed. The attendant gripped my shoulders firmly, rooting me to the spot.

“It’s Charlie. You killed him.”

The attendant actually spoke kindly. “You can’t touch him, now. Come wait for your Mam, Jim. I’ll tell you all about it if you just sit down.”

I sat. Charlie McCarthy was carted away. I went home with Mam. She said nothing for quite some time. Then she leaned over and hugged me. “I’m sorry about your friend Charlie.”

“It’s okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t. I yearned to talk with Charlie. But maybe that was as good as things would get right now. Maybe the lies Mam was told about things at St. Jim’s were all that would happen for now. If I couldn’t discuss this on street corners, perhaps in future I could. And that was all right.

Things went back to normal. Mam and I adjusted to what normal could be. I played kick the can and tag under street lamps and danced with Mam to the radio. I grew out of knickers soon, and was awarded long pants. I thought of Charlie, spit lolling from his mouth, laughing, and I smiled. I finished eighth grade, good schooling in those days.

I still work at St. Jim’s. It’s changed now. No one dissects people brains in the basement anymore. Twisted children still line its halls, but no beating is allowed, no Dog Collars. There are toys. Outside, I practice pretending. “I’m a tree today. Can you see me?”

Someone else is a tiger, an elephant, an airplane.

There’s separation of old, young, calm and crazy. No one is experimented on. I know at other places this isn’t so. I might still be at one of those places if I hadn’t got out. I was one of the lucky ones.

Sometimes I tell children how Charlie looked out for me. “Hush,” I’ll say, “someone’s chopping up people brains in the basement.”

“Why?” they’ll say.

“Because they’re nuts here, that’s why.”

And everyone will laugh.

Copyright Dawn Wood 9/11/2005

 

The people said she was a changeling, born in the reeds by a pond, raised in the wild like a fox’s cub, schooled in the ways of beasts. It was true that, with her pug nose and sun-browned face she looked more a beastie than a girl. Her hair was brown and wild, snarled up in tangles that hung down in her face. They said that she wore a gown wove of moss and reeds, with a reed cap to go with it, when she wore anything at all; that she knew the languages and ways of birds and spoke the tongues of four-legged animals. They said she was a changeling child, part squirrel and bird and wolf, with a beast’s unworldly eyes, that seemed to look at everything, endless eyes.

This would have been all well and good if she had been raised in the woods by animals, but she was born in an oridnary house, in a quite oridnary little village. Her father, Peter, was a woodcarver, and her mother, Lusha, wove patterns on a loom for the village.

They named her Graylin. It was only a nickname, really, a corruption of Grayling, “the little gray one”. That was the color of her eyes, at first. Their color changed, you see, shifted like a tiger’s eye stone, and looked different shades from different angles. Her eyes were gray as the sea, or milky green, or pale blue. They were all colors.

“The child will see far,” her grandmother said, for she was a wise woman, knowing a little about the ways of life outside the village, and a lot about the affairs of the people within it. “She will find her own path, among the beasts in the woods.”

“Beasts?” Graylin’s mother said weakly. “What beasts?” She looked fearfully about the cottage, for it was bad luck indeed to be disrespectful toward the animals themselves.

“Be quiet, old woman,” Peter said. “You speak in riddles. Talk sense if you are to stay here.”

The grandmother, Curua, the seer, who carried the name of a fox, closed her eyes. “Graylin will not be honored in this village.”

“Well, then we will find a place that honors her,” Peter said.

 

Curua was right. As Graylin grew, people shied away her. They talked about her eyes, great shifting eyes, and about her walk. She never seemed to walk anywhere, but glided or skipped or jumped like a rabbit. She talked very openly with the animals, in public where folk could see her, she nodded her head in greeting to them when she passed. She didn’t appear to find kinship with people at all.

“The poor misguided child,” one of the townspeople said, “She’s running wild.”

“Better running wild out here, than at your house, I’ll wager,” another answered. “She’s more beastie than child, I tell you, an’ always has been, her with them great eyes a hers, an’ that chittering away to them beasts gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

(unfinished so far…)

Copyright Dawn Wood 9/11/2005

 

For the longest time Mama Regan had said she wanted to go back to Ireland. “Ireland is so far, Mama,” my mother told her. But Mama Regan was relentless about it. She pulled Oz over to her side of things and had him whining about it, raising his voice at mealtimes over Ireland like a miniature embittered patriot.

“I bet you don’t even know where Ireland is,” Eva sneered one night after dinner. We had all crowded together inside the room Eva and I shared. There really wasn’t enough space for two people, let alone three – whenever anyone had to go into the hallway, the others had to press themselves against the wall and practically hold their breath to provide the space for it. But Oz didn’t take up much room at all, and if we told him often to shut up, he generally did just for the privilege of sitting with us. Eva had begged the money for some glitzy awful-looking mirror from Mom, and now she was always in front of it, arranging something or other. When she sneered, the effect was doubled by her reflection, so that Oz stared past her at the twisted image, as though a spirit rested there.

Poor Oz. There were times when I had such sympathy for him. Sitting cross-legged, he was carving designs into the carpet with his thumbnail. If my mother saw him, she would have accused him of wasted time. But Oz hardly ever wasted time, he only used his differently. “I do so know where it is,” he said, getting up and striding over to the lopsided globe that had been Eva’s and was now mine. Oz’s head was swelled up from the glory of being six, his mouth gaping from lost teeth, his pockets jingling with quarters from the tooth fairy. He spun the globe expertly until the countries blurred together into the color of rainbow sherbet, then jabbed a finger without looking. “Ireland!” he crowed triumphantly.

“He’s right,” Eva said. I could see she didn’t like being wrong. Her face became pinched thin and I saw with surprise that her bones looked long and suddenly like my mother’s. “You little cheat. Mama Regan showed you beforehand.”

“No, she didn’t! Nobody showed me. Nobody!”

“Eva,” I said. I could see danger signals. Oz’s face reddened and when I leaned over to touch his shoulders, his mouth puckered and opened wide and he began to scream. His feet jerked in a strange, rhythmic way, as though someone was pulled strings. There were no tears until I caught hold of him and shook him, then his eyes opened wide and he seemed to come back to himself. “Gracie,” he whispered.

“Yeah, Ossian. What happened to you?”

I heard a thumping sound, feet down the hallway. Dad flung open the door and demanded, “What in heaven’s name is going on in here?”

“Nothing,” Eva said.

“Nothing?” He peered at Oz, bent down by him. It wasn’t like Oz to have a tantrum, at least not one like this. There was something still strange and faraway about his eyes. Dad stayed there a long time, bent over, staring at Oz with something on his face I couldn’t read. Anger or disgust or sadness. “Hey,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

Oz gave a low whine and put both hands over his face. “March, April, June, July, August…”

“Okay,” Dad said. “You don’t have to talk about it now.” I followed him out to the hallway, just behind him, watched him lean up against the wall and rub one hand through his burr haircut. Dark grease tracks lay on whatever he touched. I never understood why he and Mom thought what Oz did was so bad. He sang, and danced in the rain and knew more songs than anyone I knew. He was kind and mostly polite and he treated everyone he met like they were his best friend. I couldn’t figure it out. This was a bad thing? He was doing all the things that were always set in front of us as good examples. Of course there were other times too, when Ossian was afraid to do the simplest things, when he could not cut paper figures, when he cried from trying to learn how to spell. But it was a puzzle to me how the good things in him got lost. No one saw he did all the childish, joyful things they had forgotten long ago.

“He’s alright,” I told Dad. He looked, absurdly, like someone who needed comforting.

“Sure he is.”

“He has room yet. To grow, I mean.”

Dad turned and eyed me, straight on, as if he didn’t know who I was. Then he smiled. “Well, you’re getting to be grown up.”

I nodded. I was really thinking out a plan. All the details weren’t clear, but I had the general idea. “What if,” I stammered, faltering over words, “what if we did go to Ireland?’

Air wheezed from Dad’s nose. He coughed and methodically wiped a blackened hand across his mouth while he thought about it. Finally he said, “Sweetheart, I’ve told you. You and everybody. It’s too far, and besides that, we don’t have the money or the time for a trip like that.”

“Pete Conroy can watch the store,” I said, ticking off items on my fingers. I talked fast so he would have to interrupt to say no. “He told me he has extra time after the ice cream shop closes. He said so. And he knows how to work on cars.” The lines in the corners of Dad’s mouth turned down, but he was quiet, still listening. Just the idea of someone else watching our little market and the autobody business, someone else bored out of their skull and counting the tiles in the ceiling seemed to intrigue him.

“Go on.”

“Maybe we don’t have to go to Ireland. Maybe we can say we are and just go to Tennessee. Mama Regan came from there too. Isn’t Tennessee just as good? Oz could be the navigator. He knows where all the states are and half the highways.”

“Are you finished?”

I nodded and crossed my fingers behind my back.

“Okay. To start with, I don’t like the idea of fooling your grandmother. She’ll know and have my head and yours. And traveling in a small car, she has better aim for throwing things at us. Secondly, Pete Conroy absolutely cannot come here to work.”

“Why not?”

Dad smiled. “Your mother has some strange notion he’s a moonshiner.”

That came from the rum raisin ice cream Pete dished. Mom found out about it, raising Cain and half the mothers in town, and might have succeeded in putting Pete out of business if Dad hadn’t somehow convinced her to stop. I think the fact that Pete was kind to us, and still paid Oz and I for junk shells and broken tumbled rocks from the beach had something to do with it. He didn’t mind Oz spinning on the ice cream stools half the day, either, so long as there weren’t other customers needing a seat. And the truth was, if anyone knew what a moonshiner looked like, it was probably Mom. Her father, Mama Regan’s husband Mody Rainbird, had a still up somewhere in the mountains until the police ran him off.

“And thirdly,” Dad said in the same even tone, making me wince, “I think it’s wonderful you’re trying to help your brother. I’ll talk to your mother about this Tennessee thing.”

“I’m not trying to help him. I’m trying to keep him out of my room.”

Something like a snicker came from Dad. “Of course.” He looked up at the ceiling, at the maze of electrical cables and raw wood joints that he’d been saying for years would be fixed any day now. “I said I would talk to your mother. But I make no promises.”

*      *      *

He must have done more than that, because a week later, Eva, Oz and I, sat at Pete Conroy’s, telling him everything that needed to be done at our house while we were gone. Oz had been freshly scrubbed, so he was tugging at his pink ears and scowling, and Eva gave him a shove and told him to quiet down.

“I wasn’t saying anything,” Oz growled.

Pete Conroy laughed. I always liked his laugh. When I was Oz’s age, people told me all the time that sounds didn’t have shapes, but sometimes I still thought they did. Pete Conroy had a big warm round laugh that made you feel good when you heard it. He looked over at Oz, took Oz’s hands away from his ears and set his own fedora over Oz’s head. My brother touched the hat carefully with the exploring fingers of a scientist, very careful in case the hat did something startling like falling to pieces. When nothing of the sort happened, he beamed, showing the wide spaces in his mouth. It was times like this I wondered two things: why people thought Oz was always reckless and why Pete had such genuine fondness for the same things that made other people’s mental radar go crazy about Oz.

“You’ve lost more teeth,” Pete Conroy said briskly. “Open up. Let me see.” With the skill of a dentist, he held Oz’s jaw and squinted at the remaining loosened teeth. “You’ve got some fine specimens. You think they’ll ever become fossils?”

Oz shook his head. The fedora slid over one side of his head. The hat was torn and threadbare. My mother would pitch a fit if she saw Oz wearing it, because of hair lice or worse things. Come to think of it, she was likely to complain about us being here anyway, even if she had reluctantly given permission.

“That’s what comes of eating so much ice cream,” Pete told Oz. I noticed his hands, thick and swollen around the knuckles. I didn’t know what it was that could do that to a person. There was a briskness to him now, almost like he was tired of us being near him. He wiped the counter with a rag and checked the drippy soda fountain. “You kids go on home. I’m closing up. I’ll see to your house. Good luck on that trip.”

“Where are you from, Pete?” Eva asked.

“What brought this on? I’m from nowhere.”

“You can’t be from nowhere,” Oz said matter-of-factly.

“I can.”

“Everyone is from somewhere,” Oz said.

Pete Conroy gave a long whistling kind of a sigh. “Ossian, believe me. I come from a place about three thousand miles from here so small it’s not even on the map. I know nowhere when I see it.” As he spoke, he reached over the counter and plucked his fedora from Oz’s head. My brother’s mouth formed a small “O,” like someone with the wind knocked out of them. His face held the longing of a hungry child too young to speak. I hadn’t seen him pay attention to something that closely for quite some time. Pete Conroy muttered to himself and took something from behind the counter, shut tight in his fist. He appraised Oz before he held out both fists. “Got something special for you. Which hand?”

Oz pressed his tongue between his teeth, closed his eyes and tapped one fist. There was nothing in it. Pete Conroy said, “Aha, try again,” and Oz did, but that hand, too, was empty. It held nothing but air. Ossian’s eyes swam with tears. “I don’t like people who lie to me,” he cried. “I don’t like people who lie to me.”

“Hey, sh. Ossian, this is something so very special you can’t even see it. It’s magical. It comes from a man who wrote a white horse.”

Oz huffed back a sob. “That’s my name.”

“That’s right. Ossian rode the white horse. And Ossian was an explorer, too, wasn’t he? He said you need to a good name to go about the country in.”

“A name.”

“Yes sir. A proud name that you can live up to. You have to act right with this name, though, because I heard you’re the map man on this trip, and a map man has to make sure everyone gets where they need to be. So.” Like someone with a great responsibility, Pete tapped Oz on the shoulder with a closed fist. “Your name is Ossian the Explorer.”

A glow appeared over Oz’s face. I could see him mouthing the name back, quietly, to himself. He liked the Explorer part best.

“All right. Now get out of here. Go on, all of you.”

Oz scrambled off the stool and raced out of the room, causing Pete’s screen door to slap back with a force that made us all wince. Eva followed, and I hung behind until Pete spoke to me without turning.

“Still here, Grace?”

I stood on my right foot gingerly, bending the left leg to get at a raw sore place where a mosquito had bitten me. Stork-like, I said, “What do you get out of this?”

I didn’t mean for it to come out harsh, an accusation, but once it was out, and tangible, I couldn’t shove the words down my throat again.

“Excuse me? What was that?”

“I mean, Dad must have told you something, otherwise you wouldn’t give Oz a name to make him behave. And you’re watching our house and giving us ice cream, so what do you get out of it?”

My skin crawled and grew hot when Pete stared at me, his face so stony that all the muscles stood out along his chin. I could see old whitened scars appear in the stubble on his throat. It felt stupid to stand, like a bird, waiting for an answer I knew wasn’t going to come.

“Eva put you up to this? No? Then I’ll tell you: I don’t want anything. I came from nowhere and I’m here in someplace that’s like nowhere, too, and I like it here because of the nice people. People who don’t ask prying little questions.”

“Okay,” I said. “All right,” and I kind of stumbled backward toward the door because I’d never seen Pete angry and I didn’t know what else to do. He called to me, quiet and like himself before I’d closed the screen behind me. I was surprised to see something in his eyes that startled me, as though he were looking at family. “Name a darn mountain after me or something. And watch that brother of yours around those cars. Maniacs drive wild up that way.”

*      *      *

It was late afternoon by the time we got everyone’s things thrown into the car – Oz’s coloring books and striped baseball shirt, Eva’s makeup kit and two huge sprawling suitcases full to bursting with the various outfits she’d picked out. Anything from sun to a raging blizzard wouldn’t have stopped Eva. I had untold amounts of excitement with Eva’s suitcases, literally slinging them about on top the fold-up chairs shoved into the very back of the car. Oz joined me, laughing in his funny way that always caught at the end, like someone who changed their mind in the middle of clearing their throat. He waved a hand in front of his mouth and danced a wild jig in his bare feet on the pavement until Mom came out of the house.

She took in the general disarray of the car and the two of us dancing around like madmen and shrugged. “You’re a bad influence, Grace,” she said, and, “If I ever catch whoever created vacations, I will personally strangle them with my bare hands.” I decided to try to make life easy for her. It looked like one of those days when she had a headache coming on.

Things got mighty interesting following this. My father locked the house and walked around the car, straightening the suitcases we had ever so carefully depositing, then he got in the car, leaned back in his seat, and said, “Boy, I need a drink.” My mother screamed for Eva, who never bothered herself with anything that broke her nails or stained her teeth, with the exception of eating ice cream, which sometimes did both depending on how fast she ate it. When Eva discovered the state of her things, and that I had done it, she grabbed up a brick with the sole intention of murdering me with it. She just might have managing it, too, only I knew she had perfectly terrible aim, and I didn’t gave her a chance. I had the car door wrenched open before she came up, screeching like a banshee, and I made it a full three laps around the entire car when I decided to make a break for the park two blocks away. I’ll say this for Eva, she kept up with me better than I thought she would.

Finally my father stood up out of the car and bellowed something that not a single one of us could understand. It had the vague quivering type of rage associated with someone whose mind is very near the breaking point, and it had the combined effect of getting all three of us kids into the car, buckled up, in the space of three minutes flat.

“We could go out for the Olympics,” Grace told me. Still red and panting, she grinned at me.

“Everyone, please,” my mother said, holding her head, while my father, cursing the maker of cars, the world in general, and that he was afflicted with such a family, wrenched our car from the driveway and down the road. Oz said he was fairly sure the speed we were going was illegal, the sign said so. Eva whispered back, that yes, he was right, and I asked if anyone wanted to launch rubber bands around the back seat. To do this, we would have to shoot them around the bulk of Mama Regan and her black oak stick, which stuck clear back into the window and which she had stubbornly refused to give up – but we assumed she wouldn’t mind a little entertainment.

“No,” Dad said with the hoarseness of a dying man. He gave us all the evil eye. “No one moves. No one so much as breathes.”

“What if we have to go to the bathroom?” Oz asked brightly.

“Learn to hold it.”

And so our vacation began.

*      *      *

 

We arrived at our first destination exhausted, irritable, and hungry, having eaten all the cream cheese sandwiches, drunk a gallon of water between all six of us, and used up every bit of civil conversation. Clearly, relaxing was not as easy as we thought. We were not the first explorers to have this dilemma.

The car came to a stop at a dry, dark black rock landscape that resembled nothing, unless you thought of the moon. Just watching it made your throat parched. Compared to the inside of the car, with its ruckus of Oz whining and Eva declaring new facts and Mama Regan’s tales, and my father’s sighs, which were somehow louder than everything put together, the outside was a blessing. I never went to a place where no sound existed. Here, everything including bugs was swallowed up by the black caverns, like decrepit mine shafts. Littered across the ground were crumbling coal black basalt exactly the shape and texture of redwood bark, and strange layers of brightly colored lichen over everything.

“I’m hungry,” Oz announced, still clutching the map with both hands. No one had been allowed to look at it since the beginning of the trip. This responsibility of navigator and explorer had put a determined expression in Ossian’s mouth. He read the map aloud in a ringing voice, spelling out the names of longer towns.

“We’re all hungry, you little twit,” said Eva. She’d abandoned her false kindness toward him and in the damp heat had become snippy and pointy-nosed. She was in a real funk ever since the heat made her hair stand on end.

“We are going,” my father proclaimed in an over-stressed voice, “to the Craters of the Moon…”

“The moon!”

“It’s not the real moon, Oz.” I said.

“It says so right here. Craters of the Moon.”

“It’s not real.”

 Oz didn’t answer. Not verbally, anyway, and for just a minute, I felt ashamed for pounding the truth into him. This only lasted a minute before the pamphlet landed directly in front of my eyes, with Oz dancing in front of it with a distraction technique worthy of the finest pickpocket. He jabbed his chubby thumb, the cuticles pink and wet from chewing, at the title and the picture beneath it. “See here? It says the moon!”

I stared at him, opened my mouth, caught a warning glance from Mom, and only sighed. All right, so we were at the moon. And we hadn’t taken a spaceship to get there. I decided right then and there that my whole entire family had collectively lost what wits we had ever possessed, and what can you do in a situation like that but go along with it. I climbed back into the car with as much dignity as I could, ignoring Oz, who catapaulted himself into the middle seat with the force of a cannonball, and doing my best to keep from shoving Eva, who decided her lipstick needed to be applied right this minute in order to keep her face from disintergrating. I once made the mistake of informing her that, given as much preservative as those lipsticks had, she might live to be two hundred. I still have the scar on my knee where she kicked me, when she was still immature enough to bear grudges.

“I’m hungry,” Oz told us before we had even pulled out.

In the front seat, my mother was trying in vain to shift the map around Mama Regan and her great black stick, which she clutched with both hands and which extended into the back seat enough that it impaired Oz’s ability to sit straight. My mother fretted constantly that he would have a crooked spine from our adventure. Mama Regan fretted constantly, too, and out loud, only her frets were different. Mama Regan was of the old-fashioned opinion that highway robbery was still common place on the diamond lanes of Interstates, and combating against this was her duty. As such, she swung the oak stick about in the car like an ancient axe murderer, poking it out of windows at people on bicycles and jabbering about how she was sure to be robbed of all worldly goods before we even reached Ireland. My father did plenty of muttering of his own while he dodged the black oak stick and drove, and his was a continous flood of expletives in creative combinations I am positive no one in our car had ever experienced before.

Somewhere along our ump-teenth U-turn, after Mama Regan nearly decapitated my father, a policeman pulled us over and inquired about my father’s driving state.

“You were driving rather erratically,” is the way he phrased it.

My father looked, I thought, like a cartoon. He had reached the point that consumes people on long trips, that kind of exhaustion and unwilling acceptance that finally makes a person emerge changed, pop-eyed and gibbering. Dad licked his lips once or twice and said something dumb about a black oak stick and a witch in the car, jabbing his thumb toward Mama Regan all the while.

“Ireland,” said Mama Regan distinctly. “We are driving to Ireland.”

“Driving?” gulped the policeman.

Oz, meanwhile, kept poking me in the ribs. “What does ‘erratic’ mean?”

“Crazy,” I told him.

Oz nodded. “I’m hungry,” he said.

“I need to pee,” Eva said.

“Edward, you’d better feed Ossian before he faints and get Eva to a restroom before she explodes,” commented my mother.

Dad, who was by then out of the car, moving one finger toward his nose and balancing on an imaginary line, stopped and growled, “Lydia, not now. I am busy.”

“Now wait just a minute…” said the policeman.

“I’ll stop him,” cried Mama Regan. I swear I am not making this up. I couldn’t be, because in a lie a real grandmother couldn’t have moved as fast as Mama Regan did. She rounded that front of the car like a small detrimined demon and before anyone thought to stop her, up came the black stick and the policeman crumpled.

In the silence came my mother’s voice.

“Oh, dear Lord!” she said. “You’ve killed him!”

Mama Regan stared doubtfully down at the body of the policeman and poked at him experimently with the end of stick. “No, I didn’t do it right. He’s coming around.”

Dad put his head in his hands and sat on the shoulder of the highway. “We are going to jail,” he said.

“I can’t go to jail,” Eva said.

“Why not?” Oz said.

“Because, you little twit, jail doesn’t have a mall.”

Mom stared at her and said something close to “Heaven help us.”

The policeman’s feet were beginning to twitch. I don’t know if he could see by then or not, but if he could, he would have seen Oz staring down into his face with a look of great interest, giving medical reports. “I’ve never seen a dead person before,” and “Look! He’s moving like a dead bug.”

“Don’t say dead,” whispered my father.

My father looked like someone already at a burial. His face was the color of just-mixed cement, wet with sweat, and his mouth was as slack as the policeman’s own.

“Passed away,” said Oz, diligently observing the man for signs of life. He looked hopefully at my father. “If he is dead, can we leave him here?”

“No,” said my mother.

Mama Regan stood poised over the body with her stick. “If he isn’t, I can hit him again.”

“No hitting,” said my mother.

“I don’t want a dead person next to me in the back seat,” Oz whined.

My father only gurgled like a drowned man. Small, unintelligible sounds came from his throat. He seized Mama Regan’s black oak stick with one hand and flung it against the fake red stone fence at the far end of the shoulder.

“That came all the way from Ireland,” said Mama Regan reproachfully. She sounded like she was talking to a disobedient child.

“We aren’t going to Ireland,” said my father.

We all stared at him. I’d thought he would sound angry, but there was only tiredness now. He was looking at Mama Regan, who believed firmly in highway robbery, and at Oz, who thought everything was hilarious, and he stood there at the shoulder, impassable, his feet braced so firmly that it looked like they went down into the earth. I knew we weren’t going to Ireland, and Eva knew it, and my mother knew, too, but it felt different now. We’d gotten caught up in it all, going to the moon and driving to Ireland, and now everything was changed. Dad stood there looking at us all, and then he said, “I’ll get that stick for you,” and went and got it.

No one noticed the policeman get up. We were all watching my father, and I’m sure we would have taken the policeman to a hospital, but I was there and this is the order that it happened. The policeman got up. He must have wavered some at it, because by the time I turned and saw him, he was shaky on his feet. His teeth were set tight, and before I could think about it at all, he had come around near Oz and snatched up Oz’s map and torn it into a dozen ragged pieces.

This was enough to get everyone’s attention. It was an act of cruelty. Oz’s face had the stunned expression of someone kicked in the stomach. He whimpered and edged away from the policeman until I could put my arm around him.

“Now,” said the policeman, “all of you against the car. All of you,” he said, looking darkly at Mama Regan.

*      *      *

We never made it to Tennesee or Ireland or anywhere else except the jail. My father tried to explain the situation, how he was plagued with a stick-wielding senile old woman and three quarrelsome children, but the policeman with his sore head refused to listen. We went to jail, too, which interested Oz no end since so many movies were filmed there, but we stayed at the policeman’s desk, playing cards and trading jokes with the men.

“They ought to go to social services,” said our policeman, cradling his head.

“They ought to,” said another, “but their folks are getting bail together, and it’s too much trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“These kids are all right,” said the second one.

Our policeman disagreed. He said we were little demons, the whole bunch of us, the kind of people who laid in wait to ambush people just doing their job.

“Demons?” said the second one. He was a lanky old man, probably at least fifty, but it’s hard to tell with grown ups. There are so many of them. He was kind to let Oz explore his desk and Oz snatched up a photo on the desk and hugged it.

“Me!” he said.

“That’s right,” said the second policeman. “It does look like you.”

No one in our family looked like Oz, so I studied the photo hard. Oz was right. The boy in the photo looked more kin to him than I did. The boy had the same always-grinning face and strange fish-like eyes. It was surprising – I had not known anyone in the world was like Ossian. He was one of a kind.

The second policeman laughed and got out things for Oz – silent bribes to get the picture back – discarded sheets of white drawing paper, a pen, a new laminated map of the United States with California on the back side of it. Oz’s pockets bulged from the weight of these things and he was smiling so hard I could count the gaps where his teeth had gone. He released the picture to clutch this newest map to his chest.

“Say thank you, Oz,” said Eva. She was not adaptable to this environment and had hidden her face in case anyone who happened by knew her. I thought if anyone knew her in a police station, it was too bad for them, but I couldn’t say so.

“He doesn’t need to,” said the second policeman. “I have a little boy just like him at home.”

Oz beamed at the man. Oz could make friends for life over gifts like these. It’s needless to say he was beyond disappointed when Mom and Dad were released – he had come to see the police station as a friendly place full of gifts – but we went just the same. Not toward Tennessee, but away from it, back the way we came, along different roads. My father skirted the highways, taking back roads and avoiding the diamond lane at all costs in case Mama Regan decided a reenactment of the policeman’s demise was in order. No one spoke the whole way, God forbid, but somehow the travel time flew faster and we were back again at Pete Conroy’s, milkshakes in hand.

“I will never take care of your shop again,” Pete Conroy was saying for the fortieth time. None of us asked him what had happened during our absence, but Oz had disgraced us by blurting that we had been arrested and spilling the whole story right out there on the counter like it was an everyday thing.

“Don’t you go asking me for anymore favors,” Pete Conroy ordered.

Oz nodded. “I’m the Explorer,” he said, and then, “No more favors.”

“Good,” said Pete Conroy. “Glad to hear it.” He lifted his swollen knuckles and rapped at the counter. “Get along home before your mother comes in and sees me giving you that ice cream.”

Oz licked a white moustache from around his mouth. “She thinks you’re a moonshiner.”

I thought Pete Conroy might take offense at this. It isn’t, after all, something you can say to anybody. And if Pete Conroy took offense at us, after everything he’d done, watching our house and giving Oz and I dimes and quarters for broken pieces of rock and shells, enough money that we had to save it in a bank instead of underneath our shirts in dressers, that would be a shame. It would mean the loss of ice cream and everything else, especially for Oz, since Mom only allowed him to cross the highway with us to go to Pete Conroy’s. And Ossian had a love for the highway, for cars and roads and maps that rivaled his love for squirming bugs and dinosaurs.

Eva hissed at Oz. I didn’t hear it, only the noise, a flat sound like that of air from a tire and it succeeded in deflating Oz. His face crumpled into lines, but he did not have a tantrum this time. He quivered and gulped and his fists seized and released, and he did this for several minutes until he calmed down. He was, after all, Ossian the Explorer, descendent of the Ossian who traveled to the underworld, and he had responsibilities.

But Pete Conroy only laughed. “Lydia thinks everyone is a moonshiner. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was one herself.”

A picture of my mother entered my mind – Mom sneaking across borders with a trunk full of hooch in the back, Mom out in the woods with a shotgun and a still. Mom says I watch too much television, and that not all moonshiners were that way, and she should know considering that her daddy was one. But that’s what I thought of, just the same.

“Look,” Ossian said. He held both fists out to Pete Conroy in a perfect imitation of Pete’s earlier guessing game. And Pete went for it, there was no doubt about that. He hid a smile and tapped Oz’s hands, one after the other. Both were empty. I was surprised Oz had remembered. Even surrounded by magic tricks as we were, every spring when Cousin Jake used to come by the house, Ossian had never parroted those. Magic tricks tended to puzzle him. He loved them, of course, we all did, and he could ask for them again and again, but he could not successfully carry one out. He showed his hand too early in string tricks. He moved too slow to hide quarters, so that you could pick out the glint of metals between his fingers. He would, on request, show that all cards in a deck were the king of hearts. And the whole time he would grin as though he was the greatest magician in the world.

So I was surprised as anything that he would show Pete’s trick back to him like that. And I was proud, too, when Ossian laughed at Pete Conroy’s puzzled face. “Fooled you!” he hollered, delighted.

And then he withdrew from his pocket three small rocks the color of nighttime, that special kind of shivery reflectiveness that can turn peacock-colored in a minute. They looked something like coal, and I could not imagine where Ossian had found them. I wondered if he had plucked them whole from the shoulder of the highway, if they had been something lost in the weeds that I had missed.

Pete Conroy looked long and hard at the rocks, and it came to me that Oz’s trickery was a skill. “Where did you get those?”

“From the moon!”

“Aha,” said Pete Conroy. It was a different sort of “Aha!” than before.

Oz waved his whole arm at Eva and I, energetically, as though he was indicated a room of people. “I took them all to the moon.”

“I can see that. Are these for me?”

Ossian nodded so enthustically he bit his tongue. “Yes. A gift.”

“You give good gifts,” Pete Conroy told him. He took the scratchy iridescent things from Oz’s hands and set them with great ceremony on the shelf behind the counter. He stood looking at them for a long time, while Eva towed Oz outside. If we had let him, Oz could have spent all day at the ice cream shop, just doing nothing but talking to the folks who came in through the door. But I didn’t leave. I wanted to ask Pete Conroy what he got out of all this, again, but I didn’t considering what had happened the last time. I watched him fill out an index card and write something on it. Now the rocks were labeled. The sign said “Found by Ossian Rainbird, Explorer.”

“As good as a museum,” said Pete with satisfaction.

“Are they worth anything?”

“Not money, no. Not much. They’re just what’s left of volcano ash that’s processed just right.”

I looked again at the rocks. That place had seemed like such a dead country. But to Ossian, it must have been alive with things to do. I thought of the fish-eyed smiling boy who belonged to the second policeman. “You knew someone like Oz, didn’t you?”

It was quite awhile before Pete answered. The question didn’t anger him, but he took the time to say it right. Then he said, “Grace, I told you I came from a small place. My cousin did, too, and he was like Oz. I don’t know what was the matter with him. If you can call it that. Sometimes I wondered what was the matter with the rest of the town. I moved here to get away, and my cousin moved up north a bit, with my aunt. I see him at Christmas.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. It was good to know that I could talk of other things with him. None of us could talk to my mother about Oz or she would give over to hysterics.

When I turned to go, Pete Conroy shoved a five dollar bill into my hand. “Give that your brother.”

“It was a gift.”

“I know it. But give it to your brother. And watch out crossing the road with him. The maniacs drove crazy around here.”

I smiled. “Yes.”

Through the screen door, flecked with flies and dirt, I could see Oz straining against Eva’s hand, stomping his feet and staring out at the passing cars with large eyes. One shoulder of his coat had slipped off and hung over his arm. Even from there, even from inside the ice cream shop, I could hear him singing a song with the words mixed up, the kind of song people used to sing as they worked, an Irish song Mama Regan had taught him. It was a ribald one that made Eva tug at the arm with the fallen coat sleeve, tug at it and hide her face, but Oz sang on, singing high and getting the words right every now and then, just singing and singing for the pure joy of it.

 

Copyright Dawn Wood 1/9/2005

Kangaroo Fulton’s father said that there were spirits in the mountains. He meant the mountains that curved, the green weedy ones just past the beach, the ones so far I had never visited them, even on a bicycle. We were sitting in Kangaroo’s trailer, among the doilies and soft-looking worn furniture Kangaroo’s mother had bought second-hand before she died. Kangeroo and I were together as often as two people can be, from age two on, and I remembered his mother in childhood with the same fogginess as my own. I remembered that Kangaroo’s mother’s name was Alice. Alice Juniper. My mother said Alice Juniper had been the fastest dancer in these parts, but I don’t know anything about that. When I knew Alice Juniper, I only knew the greenness of the jacket she wore, and that she had a fondness for baking chocolate chip cookies with Kangaroo and I. “Ah, Alice, you’ll ruin that boy,” Kangaroo’s father would say.

“There is no such thing as spirits,” Kangaroo said firmly. There was a little catch at the end of his voice. I could tell by his eyes that he wanted to believe in it, but you’d never know it just from talking with him. Kangaroo was experatingly scientific. By the time he was nine, he knew all the botanical names of half the plants and bugs at the beach and the woods. It was no wonder he got along so well with Oz. There were times when I thought he was more Oz’s friend than mine.

I yawned and stretched. It was raining outside, pouring down so hard that the roof seemed to shake from the impact of it. The humidity inside Kangaroo’s trailer was unbearable, and we pretty much gone through every kind of civilized conversation and board game in the place. Out of boredom, and a sort of mean spitefulness, we had started up a contest to see who could pitch pillows the farthest down the narrow hallway. Kangaroo won. That is, he would have, but we didn’t intend on Kangaroo’s father coming out of his bedroom, bent over and rubbing his eyes, and catching the pillow on the top of his head. He gave a startled, strangled yipping noise, like a terrier dog, and his hands waved spasmodically around for several minutes while he debated whether this was a dream or real life. When he had decided he wasn’t being ambushed by spear heads, he’d rubbed his hair down flat again, sighed, and came into the living room with us. He said he was doing it to make sure we stayed out of his hair.

That was one of Kangaroo’s father’s favorite expressions – “Staying out of my hair.” He said it often, usually in reference to something Kangaroo and I had done, and he usually wore the fretful, cornered look of someone who knows something bad will be sure to befall him.

Kangaroo nudged me tiredly. All the sudden crabbiness from the damp was going out of him and he looked too weary to do anything interesting. “You owe me five dollars,” he said.

“No, I don’t. You didn’t make it down the hall.”

“Didn’t make it down the hall?” Kangaroo’s father said feverishly. “It bounced off my head, for Pete’s sake! I’m the one you ought to be paying.”

“We don’t have the five dollars anyway, Pop.” Kangaroo’s voice was soothing. I noticed he often took that tone with his father, as though it was Mr. Fulton who was the child.

“I don’t care about any five dollars. Just, for once, please, can’t you go outside and let me sleep?” Mr. Fulton sometimes worked the night shift at the lumber mill. He worked the machine that washed the bark straight off the logs, and sometimes they changed shifts on him down at the mill, suddenly, and didn’t tell him right away. He was a skinny man, all knees and elbows like the knots on a tree and he had a face that was brown, too, like burnt saddle leather. He was a jumpy person, too, and he was always saying Kangaroo would come to ruin the way he ran around unguided without someone to look out for him. That always made me smile, because for all his talk, there probably wasn’t a single soul in town who spoiled Kangaroo more than Mr. Fulton himself.

“Yessir, spirits on the mountain,” Mr. Fulton said. “I’ve seen ‘em, out there with crews cutting down trees. They sabotage machinery, cause accidents.”

“You’ve got it wrong, Pop. It’s gremlins that do that. And it’s airplanes.”

“Oh, is it? You’ve never been out there like I have.”

“All right, prove it,” I told him. Mr. Fulton stared at me blankly before his eyes slid past me and he shrugged.

“It’s not anything you can prove, Grace. It either is, or it isn’t. The only way I could show you would be to take you up there.”

Kangaroo jumped to his feet so sudden that I almost flinched. Behind his glasses, his eyes were wide and bright, his lips a swollen red from biting at them. He bent his wrist until it cracked double-jointed and Mr. Fulton winced like he always did at the sight. “That’s right, prove it, if it is true.”

I stared at Kangaroo. I had never seen him like this. He was speaking to an adult the way you would another child in a dare. It was an order, and everyone there knew it. Kangaroo sat down again, with his legs folded around him. His glasses slid down so that it looked like he had a array of miniscule eyes, like an ant. I’d once tried to wear his glasses when I was younger, but to my surprise, things only looked blurred and misshapen through them, not the magic I’d expected. It always drove me crazy that he didn’t push them up. A maze of bug bites covered his legs. He was wearing shorts despite the incessant rain.

I felt, suddenly, caught in the middle of a family squabble and I didn’t want to be there. “It’ll turn cold,” I told Kangaroo, gesturing at his shorts. “You might want to…”

“I don’t need your advice, Grace Rainbird,” he snapped. There it was. We’d all known the rain would lead to fighting, it was only a matter of time, but still I was taken aback by the venom in his voice, as though I was trying to force him to be something he wasn’t, to change his skin and become someone else.

We eyed each other until Kangaroo’s father clapped his hands together with such false cheerfulness that we both turned to stare at him. “A trip to the mountain. When do we start?”

*          *          *

We started the next week, after I’d disarmed my mother’s resistance to the idea and convinced her it would be a fine thing for me to be out of the house for awhile.

“I don’t know,” she said, slapping down plates for dinner. They weren’t the fancy plates she usually took out; those hadn’t been used since Cousin Jake’s last visit the fall before. I saw her looking up at them in the hutch cabenit, a look of longing across her face. It wasn’t the plates she wanted so much, I knew, it was Jake. She scanned the mail sometimes, too, with the same hungry glazed-over view that made me think maybe she didn’t saw them at all. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t any use, that Jake was long gone and it being near fall didn’t make a difference to him. But still she worried, no matter what anyone told her, worried about him the same as if he was our age, as though someone had carried him off. But the plates, anyway, put her old adage about presentability to rest. “We have to look presentable,” she used to hiss to Oz and I when we didn’t want to get the good plates from their shelf every year. “For pity’s sake, it wouldn’t hurt you to be presentable once in a while.”

“I don’t like this idea of the woods, Grace,” she told me, the slap of each cup and plate like a reproach. “Why don’t you take Oz with you?”

“She can’t be expected to take him everywhere,” Dad called from the living room. His burr haircut shone white from what I could see of it through the dining room door, and he had his feet up on the coffee table, one of the positions my mother forbade. I smirked, and right off Mom said, “What are you cackling about?”

“I can’t take Oz,” I said. I was trying to be thoughtful, so that she would know I had considered this reasonably. “He’ll scare away the fish.”

“Not fishing, too.” Her lips went thin. “You’ll drown, the whole bunch of you.” From the living room came the roar of a crowd during a football game and Dad’s shout. “Take Eva at least,” she told me. It was a weak gesture, and we both knew it. Eva would sooner have died than walk through the mountain with unidentifiable mud on her shoes. She said as much when the topic was brought up at the table. Oz’s face brightened when he heard about the mountain and I warded off any tears by saying I would bring him back something nice.

“A cow skull!” he blurted. Milk splatters littered the table in front of him. “A cow skull for my room, like the westerns!”

“I don’t think…” I started to say and my mother covered her face with one hand and something similar to, “Not this one too,” came from her. Mom always had a losing battle with ladylike behavior with me. After a minute, she recovered. “We haven’t even decided you can go yet.”

“It seems Grace has.”

This, from my father. He watched Mom’s face while he spooned green beans into his mouth without looking at them. Underneath the table, I could hear faintly the gentle thumping of his shoes tapping out a rhythm. Dad had been a drummer in the jazz band in high school and the feeling and drive for rhythms never left him. I tried to pick out the melody of the tune, but couldn’t manage. Mom huffed, her arms folded over her middle like a unpenetrable obstacle. Air pushed itself from out of her nose in a sigh. I waited for something, any protest, but she only sniffed and said, “Well, if you must.”

I packed a bag and wore Jake’s old magician’s jacket. I don’t know why I’d saved the thing. It was ratty old and patched and covered with cigarette burns and ancient stains. At first I kept it out of memory for Jake, and later because it was one of the things that drove Mom wild. Everytime I saw the jacket, a rush of loss and anger came over me so hard I couldn’t think. But still, it was the first thing I packed, creasing the soft folds and worn leather until a sense of comfort came.

When Eva came in I slapped the jacket hurriedly into the suitcase and latched it, waiting for Eva’s smart remarks about the jacket, but she said nothing. She had the tip of her tongue between her teeth and was nipping at it, her eyes bright. “I don’t want to come,” she said.

“Thank God for that.”

“It’s just –“ she paused, and I saw her eyes ticking back and forth, searching for suitable words, the right words that wouldn’t make Mom think we were fighting again. Eva was puzzling. She had briefly left her Holier-Than-Thou pedestal and seemed to be trying to be my friend, for no other reason I could see than maybe she felt sorry for me. Just the idea of that made me so mad I had to fight the urge to argue with her just for the spite of it. Mom told Dad I was wounded after Jake left. Mama Regan had helped me with being wounded before, but I could not go to her: she had of late taken to dozing more and more in front of the television, waking to 1929 and my grandfather’s house. In spite of everything, I had pretty much stopped beginning friends to the house because of the times when Mama Regan wanted to know where Mom had stashed Grandpa John. So she was bad enough but if anything Eva was worse. The older-sister deal she had going now was enough to make me sick. I wanted things to be normal again. I didn’t want Eva to be my friend; I wanted to make war with her.

Eva said, “You get to have all the fun.” I waited, but she didn’t finish the sentence all the way, didn’t say whether she wanted to go or not, which gave me relief. With narrowed eyes I watched her delicate hands threaded themselves together. For a minute, horrified, I thought she was about to beg me for something – something I couldn’t even begin to name, something deep and ancient. Companionship, possibly, but that was ridiculous. Eva had a whole posse of eternally giggling friends who trooped about the house in shirts and jeans that made my mother cover her face in shame. So of course such a thing as a friendship with me was out of the question.

Cradling the suitcase in one hand, I hoped I looked eager and ready for the trip to the woods. Jake’s jacket was really too warm for the house, let alone our small cramped room, and I was beginning to sweat buckets in it already, but pride and some kind of stubbornness made me keep it on. I made my way past Eva and out to the hall, where I announced to the assembled family that I was going. Dad smirked like he was laughing and Mom looked stern, the etched lines in her face standing out more from the effect she put into frowning. Just when Jake’s jacket was ready to melt me entirely and I was convinced that leaving at all for some crazy dare of Kangaroo’s was too much, Oz ran up. He ran with the speed of someone feverish, a breathless toddling run with both shoelaces undone and slapping dully against his ankles and the backs of his legs. The cowlick in his hair was standing up, so that he resembled some kind of minature troll-like beast. Before I could laugh at him or tease him, he pressed two things into my right hand.

“Gracie, wait,” he said, his small voice rising up shrill and insistent, the voice of an expert giving life-saving advice. “You need these.”

I rubbed the objects in my hand together. They felt familiar and an easy warmth came to me. I couldn’t tell at first what they were, even when I should have known. I opened the hand, palm up, and there were the green healing malachite stone that had once belonged to Mama Regan, and Oz’s own slingshot, cut from a tree limb in the park.

“For protection.” Oz told me. A thick hoarse cough came from Dad and I could see him struggling to hold in the laughter. Mom, on the other hand, looked even more pinched, and I knew she would soon be talking to Oz again about his imagination. But honestly, she couldn’t say very much, because Eva and I both realized Oz’s survival depended on it. He’d been stuck in a little closet classroom with five ear-pulling, eye-poking, delinquent wannabes of the Three Stooges and given those kind of odds, I’d have a runaway imagination too.

Oz stiffened a little when I pulled him toward me in a hug, but then he relaxed. His soft humming filled my ears. He was making up songs again, tuneless, repetitive songs that had their own kind of rhythm.

“Take good care of my slingshot, Gracie,” he called after me.

*          *          *

I’d expected a proper campground to make tents, but the place Kangaroo’s father led us could only be described as desolate. The grass was green, true enough, but the ground was pitted every second step with tiny chert stones and much of the grassland was taken up by dead fallen trees, thrown pick up sticks from a gigantic hand. I perked up some at the logs, seeing black beetles and many bugs for collection, but none of these pleased Kangaroo.

“You are the most stubborn person I know,” I told him. He already knew, and it didn’t get a rise out of him. I resolved in future to be more crafty. A earwick in his sleeping bag or a frog at the picnic table during breakfast might have better results. All that day, Kangaroo said nothing to his father except the things required by mere politeness. It seemed to make Mr. Fulton more determined than ever to show the spirits to Kangaroo. That night, after we’d pitched – three lopsided, moldy pup tents with bent rusty poles – we started a campfire and waited for the spirits.

“Oh, they’ll come alright,” said Mr. Fulton, all smiles between swigs of cocoa.

“Fire probably frightens them,” Kangaroo remarked in his most scientific voice. For much of the night, he seemed lost in the fire, taking in the shadows the flames threw and the red-hot designs of the coals. At one point, he’d looked very close to tears.

“Well, today being Wednesday, they’ll probably come. They like a good Wednesday.”

“A good Wednesday?”

A hard wind crackled through the trees, winging through them so fast they seemed to speak and I could have shown I heard a high quavering howl that matched the way Kangaroo looked. His glasses had slipped halfway off one ear and dangled there, swaying, and his face looked almost yellowish from the firelight, long and narrow as a tiny demon. I could have shown his eyes glowed amber.

The next day, he was a little better. Mr. Fulton was kind to him over breakfast, scalding bitter coffee and a hard biscuit in a firing pan. “I never was much of a cook,” Kangaroo’s father said in way of apology when he shoved the meal over to me. “It was Cora who was the cook in the house.”

Kangaroo did not respond at all, but I saw the bitter slant of his eyes, the methodical way he chewed. He took me fishing, afterwards, the two of us in a long canoe that had once been the owner of a lime green coat of paint, since peeling. I clung to the sides of the boat. It didn’t look all that seaworthy, let me tell you. We’d found it along the lake bed, choked with weeds and thoroughly abandoned, and Kangaroo had suggested we clean it up, which took the better part of the morning and left a muggy, ill-settled sky over us for the sailing portion.

“Do you remember my mother?” Kangaroo asked after a time.

“Sort of. She had red hair and a plaid apron and she said she was a slave to the kitchen.”

“That’s right.”

“You shouldn’t blame him,” I said. “He didn’t kill her.”

“No one killed her. She’s just dead. There’s a difference between killed and dead, don’t you know that?”

“Sure.” But really I didn’t. Dead was dead any way you looked at it, and I didn’t see why Kangaroo dwelled so much on it. “Why does it matter to you after all this time?” I didn’t mean to be callous, only Kangaroo stared at me.

My hand found the green malachite stone in my pocket. It felt cold and good against the humid heat of my hands. I took it out and flipped it back and forth until Kangaroo caught it with a quick, almost imperceptible snap of his wrist and flipped it into the water.

“Why does your precious cousin matter to you? He’s gone, isn’t he, and he doesn’t show any signs of coming back for you or anybody else.”

For a minute I couldn’t speak. Something was locked in my throat, a cold bit of hematite stone, and swallow hard as I could, I couldn’t choke it down. I wanted to shout at Kangaroo, to tell that was a cruel thing to say, and I could not have said myself why Jake mattered to me anymore than I could have explained the groupings of stars. He was like a big brother, somebody who shared the same soul I did. Or at least I had thought so once. Now I was not so sure, and this more than anything else made me resist the sudden urge to whack Kangaroo about the head with the canoe paddle.

I think Kangaroo was sorry. He didn’t say it, only when he spoke again the words were softer and they had lost their hard edge. “Look, Grace.”

I didn’t want to. I was still scanning the bottom of lake bed, a deep bright green the color of a child’s crayon. Still, I was almost certain I saw the stone resting against a wide brown rock, one of the only boulders at the bottom. A swarm of black crappies the shape and color of arrowheads were examining it to see if it was good to eat. I was sure I would know the place if I came across it again.

“Grace,” Kangaroo whispered, and I raised my head up just in time to see a grey blur that ran like a cat and reminded me of a dog, but to tell the truth, it was up and gone so fast I didn’t get a good look. It made me think of Mr. Fulton’s spirits on the mountain, even though that was silly. “A wolf,” Kangaroo was saying. His face had taken on a warm glow and for the first time he seemed like himself. “A grey one. They’re supposed to be rare up in these woods. The farmers hunt them down so the few that are left mainly hide out in caves, I think.” He pinched the edge of his nose and smiled at me, and I smiled back, relieved to see him. “It’s a sign.”

“A sign? From who?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Whoever it is who makes signs. But there it is.” He paused and bit his lip again, like someone experimenting with a thought they wanted to get right. Then he leaned forward. “It’s my mother. I felt her.”

I wanted to say, “Sure, you did,” but instead I held in a nervous laugh. Kangaroo reminded me so much of Oz, then, Oz who chanted numbers and words and could write as well as anyone if you only looked in the mirror at the words. It wasn’t like Kangaroo at all to act like Oz. He was always so practical. Instead I asked I asked why he felt so sure and how his mother had become a wolf, an odd reincarnation if ever there was one. But Kangaroo seemed to have sprung something inside him. Never the talkative sort, he was thrown into a spasm of words: how his mother had died on a Wednesday; how they had gone to the woods like this, how his father didn’t care or didn’t remember any of it. I tried to think back, to remember if Kangaroo had gone to the mountain before. He would have bragged to me about the going, if he had, but my mind was whirling, still searching for the green malachite stone under the water, even when I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Kangaroo. Then I knew.

“I don’t believe you,” I told him. “I don’t believe that she’s here. You said yourself there’s a difference in killed and plain dead. If there is, there’s sure a difference in where you go, isn’t there?”

Kangaroo licked his lips and shut his mouth. I folded both arms across my chest and rowed my oars so hard it was difficult for Kangaroo to keep up. Before the boat had even bumped against the shore, I was up and out of it, not with any kind of hurrying but quick, measured steps, beating out all the words I could not say with footsteps. I left everything, the rope untied, the oars knocking with dull hollow thumps against the side of the boat. I looked back only once before I found my way back to camp. Kangaroo was struggling to tie the boat to the dock, his thin bony knees sticking up ridiculously from his jeans, his fingers clumsy at the tying, a look of such calm on his face that I felt a sudden stab of envy.

*          *          *

Before the sun broke over the mountains the next morning I crept out of my sleeping bag and headed for the lake. I thought I had kept good tabs on it the day before, but it was hard going in the dark, and long before I got to the rough little shore my legs bore the scratches and stings of a half-dozen rocks and plants I couldn’t even begin to name. I’d thought the way would be easy but there was no sure path down to the lake, only a series of animal trails so tiny as to be invisible in the dark. There was one pine tree, a ponderosa, hung with offerings and prayers of a local Native American tribe. It’s branches were weighted with strips of braided grass and bright cloth covered bundles. My father had told me about these, once, these tangible prayers, and I was careful not to touch them when I steadied myself against the tree. The lower half of the tree was stripped bare of bark from an invasion of hungry porcupines, and in many places it wept a sap that smelled of vanilla. I tore the sap loose and chewed it with great concentration, the way Mama Regan had once instructed. At first it tasted of nothing at all, but later it was sweet and good. It settled me somehow, grounded me, took my mind off the boat and the stone and the finding of it until I was so close to the water I almost fell in. I jumped back from of the wetness, soaked and so disoriented that I had to squint hard through sudden fog to find the boat. It blended in well, and was so at home at the dock that I had to swear and grind my shoes into the dock boards to shove it out into the water.

There was no rain in the sky. Maybe it couldn’t rain with the fog so bad. But mostly I kept my gaze on the lake, searching for the brown boulder in that mass of green algae. I would know the smooth green of the stone, I’d had it so long. I hadn’t bet on the fog, though, and it hung close around me. After a long time, I don’t know how long, I thought I saw the malachite under the weight of water, that dark green, and I reached down for it. A shimmy came from the boat. All I remember is a brief terrifying shudder when the rotten boards under me split apart, dissolving, sinking down to the bottom of the lake.

*          *          *

Mama Regan had carried stories from Ireland as a child, it was said. They were so old they contained the lives of lephrucans, and Finn McCool, the giant, and the small, shifty-eyed fairies the size of children who would trick you or murder you or save your life. Mama Regan carried these tales, bringing them out to dust them off, every now and then, limbering her tongue with the lilting words. Now about the only story she ever told was the one Oz took his name from. It was the tale of Ossian, friend of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland who wasn’t Irish at all. But Ossian, now, rode a white horse to Tir Na Og, land of the ever-young and stayed three hundred long years. Some say the way to Tir Na Og lies under the hills, in the odd stone ruins of fairies, others say the true road is through the water. The ocean, in particular. It is said, too, that if you eat or drink in this land of fairies, you will be bound there forever and can never get home again.

It wasn’t that way for me. When I sank under the water, the coldness of it, crisp enough to make the veins in my neck stand up, shocked me into opening my eyes. The water was so clear and green it was like a special kind of glass, and the only thing I thought of was staying there, where I could see everything. I forgot all about Mama Regan’s stone. I forgot everything. My mind was blank and warm and I was suddenly very tired. I held my breath, but the water forced its way down my throat, tiny spears of it one after the other until I stopped kicking and relaxed. It was then I saw the eyes. I swear to you I am not making this up. They were there in front of me, yellowish dog’s eyes, and after a while the rest of the animal, a lanky wolf with scarred legs and strangely perfect ears appeared before me. Don’t ask me how the wolf breathed under water. It’s Mama Regan who’s the expert in these matters, not me. But there it was, just the same, and all I thought of was that a wolf with ears like that had never been in a brawl. Which is an odd thing to think of. My only excuse is that something had happened under water. I had a funny feeling that I needed to take Oz’s slingshot out. Not for protection, like he’d said, but more like an offering like the ones to spirits and ancient gods and the earth that rested in the branches of the pine tree. Maybe there are many ways of protection, I don’t know. I only know my fingers were too numb to hold the slingshot and it fell, too, down with the malachite. The wolf began licking at my face and hands with a force so hard it felt like blows.

“Grace!” someone was shouting. “Grace Rainbird!”

I wanted whoever it was to stop yelling. I could hear but moving my mouth was a different matter. The narrow muzzle of the wolf turned into Kangaroo’s thin mouth and low cheekbones. The yellow eyes turned into his glasses reflecting in the sun. Skinny double-jointed Kangaroo kept whacking me across the chest with a force I hadn’t thought he had in him, pinwheeling his arms like a windmill. He was energized, moving his hips, so excited that I doubt half his work hit where he wanted. It didn’t take all that long for me to sit up, cough up enough water to get air into my lungs and tell him to lay off.

Kangaroo stared at me. He sat up on his haunches and wiped his glasses off with the edge of a shirt striped like a stick of candy, and already filthy. “I thought you were gone,” he said.

I shook my head. “I lost Mama Regan’s rock.”

“What?”

“I lost that green rock. And Oz’s slingshot. I lost Oz’s slingshot. And I haven’t even found him a cow skull…”

“You don’t need it.”

“Yes, I do. I promised. He told me to take good care of it.”

“That wasn’t what I meant. You don’t need the rock. It isn’t going to give you anything you don’t already have.”

I considered this. It didn’t make an iota of sense. But then, not all that much did right at that moment. My head felt full of cotton fuzz. I think your body holds more than just visual memory; it still felt as though the wolf was licking me. The hair on my arms stood on end from it. Those great yellow eyes with a depth like nothing else were still in front of me, an after-image I couldn’t shake off. “Your mother,” I said.

Kangaroo’s mouth hung a little slack. I think it was from shock or something, but with Kangaroo it was hard to tell. He was the only person I knew who could go around every single day tinkering with discarded machinery and electronics and be completely content with it. I noticed strange small things about him I’d never noticed before. Maybe the lake sharpened my vision. I saw with wolf eyes the dark mottled impressions from gravel on his knees, a rip in those ugly grey dishtowel weave shorts he always liked to wear. Something had hold of him in a bad way. It made him shake until he raised his right hand to his mouth and bit down on the knuckles. “Gracie, don’t.”

“I know about your mother. She’s right here. I saw her. She’s a wolf.”

I thought he’d be pleased, but he just shook his head and held that hand up against his mouth like he was holding in a storm. “No.” The first word was whispered, the others came stronger. “She would have come talked to me. Dad brought me here to see the spirits.”

We were silent for a long time. Only a bird that called in a laughing voice made any sound. I couldn’t figure Kangaroo out. He was the one who tried so hard to convince me of the wolf in the beginning, and now he wouldn’t talk. He was still soaked when he went past me and drove back into the lake. It swallowed him up. I waited, holding my breath. When I counted to ten two times at least, Kangaroo surfaced again and came dripping and worn down over to me. “I owe you, all right?” he said. “I owe you this.”

When he opened his hand, Oz’s slingshot and the smooth edges of Mama Regan’s stone sat sparkling in the sun.

*          *          *

What Kangaroo had spoken of with such conviction, we never discussed with anyone else. Of course we had to tell Mr. Fulton about the lake and the almost-drowning, we couldn’t very well have gone into camp exhausted and pretend nothing at all happened. But the wolf, that was different, and special in its own way. A kind of sacred that had nothing to do with religion and more to do with the primitive oaths of children that can never be broken. It wasn’t as though Kangaroo and I swore to keep it secret, it was just a mutual agreement settled on without speaking when we took the long path back to the tent. Mr. Fulton said he was sorry he hadn’t been able to show us the spirits, and he seemed puzzled when Kangaroo spoke to him and didn’t scorn him for the dare. There was nothing to be done about telling my mother, and that brought trouble once I was home. She fussed, and forbade me to go out of the house or see Kangaroo for an endless amount of time. She took my temperature and fed me soup. Worse yet, she left me in the clutches of Oz, furious that I hadn’t toted home a whole cow skull like I’d said. Eva hovered between petty annoyances and proper gloating that my trip had been ruined. I guess her big sister thing was on the rebound again which was the way I liked it. I got fed up with it all after a week, tossed the covers off, threw a shoe at Eva and ran out of the house for Kangaroo’s before Mom could say a syllable.

Mr. Fulton was barbequing near the flaking picket fence and Kangaroo was sitting with his back to the steps of the trailer, flipping a fishing pole up and down.

“Hey,” I said,

“Hey.” He looked up and gave me one of his rare smiles. “If it isn’t Grace Rainbird.”

“You want to do something?

“There’s nothing remotely interesting.”

Mr. Fulton pointed with a spatula. “Break that fishing pole doing that, and things will get considerably less interesting.”

“On the other hand…”

We headed out in no particular direction whatsoever and ended up at the beach. We sat on the bank and pulled our legs up under us and said nothing for a long time. It was the most content I’d been since all that wildness that came with “being sick” around the house. “I want to…” I stopped, examined a sand crab burrowing its way out of its hole. Sand crabs, if you’ve never seen one, are grey and hard-shelled like a sow bug and ugly as sin. I shoveled sand over this one, watching it struggle to climb out of a mountain of sand that grew indefinitely.

“Stop,” Kangaroo told me, so I did.

“I want to…to thank you for…”

“Would you stop? Isn’t this something, the great Grace Rainbird humbling herself to lowly little me?”
Little was right. I seized a sudden detrimination to bury him whole in the sand and flung as much as I could at him while he weaved and dodged.

“You’d have towed me in if I fell in the lake,” he said, after we’d settled down, covered with sand.

“You’re too big for me to tow you.” In a way, this was the truth. He was taller than I was, but I’m told things are different in water, different when you panic.

Kangaroo told me in a low voice that things were back to normal for his father and him. It was easier now for him to talk to Mr. Fulton about his mother. I told him that Oz had his slingshot back and had, by now, shot dried peas in my direction so often that I had threatened to find a rather large puddle to drop his slingshot into. Kangaroo mentioned the wolf only once. “I have this dream at night,” he said, describing the eyes, the rough yet polished coat of the animal. He waited, expected me to tease him no doubt, and when I didn’t, he said it spoke with his mother’s voice. It told him the things he had waited to hear.

I couldn’t have teased him. But I didn’t tell him, either, that I had the same dream. Every night I watched the strange otherworldly eyes of the wolf circle around me. I never heard in coming, but you never do, with a wolf. It has something to do with the make-up of its paws, I believe. It spoke to me of the lake and the prayer tree, and all of these I could see clearly. But I always woke before I could manage to tell Eva about any of it, and when I woke, the wolf vanished. After it left, my hair always felt wet and clean, and I was lucky with a peaceful feeling and happy dreams.

Copyright Dawn Wood 9/11/2005

 

I don’t know rightly how I come to be with Jitney. Over the years he told me a handful of stories about it. My mama looked like the wild ferns of the woods, and she had a red dress like fire itself. Daddy had his own farm once, and when irrigation was troublesome, he bent the river’s course to water his crops. But with Jitney I was a picker, and harvested. I’d never seen a farm that wasn’t owned by someone we worked for. Jitney was always being turned away from places. He was proud and polite, and I couldn’t see why so many people hated him. Hard to tell how old he was, he had a weathered face. He dressed like I did: shirt, overalls, and moccasins, with a plaid jacket. There was the bindle, a bedroll tied atop a backpack, with an oilskin tarp over it, and a nine-foot cotton sack for picking.

 Jitney wasn’t kin to me. He could’ve dumped me along the tracks anywhere, but he never did, never told me nothing about my past except small stories.  Reckon he done as best he could. I didn’t have a proper name, only Slowpoke. As I got older, this started to rile me.

He made moccasins in the evenings after work.  I remember playing with the scraps, and the smell of leather. He waterproofed them with fat. He had magic in his hands, making those shoes for us, the same as he did when he fiddled.

When we were in between jobs was when I had the most time with him. We’d load our packs and bindles, and be off hopping trains, or go through the woods. When we were on the road, Jitney would say we were “bindle-walkin’”. He set such pride by that, the fact that we could go anywhere we pleased. Jitney could spend weeks in the woods. I remember asking him why we didn’t stay there all the time. He knew all the tracks and stories of the animals, what they did and how they sounded. One year he give me a slingshot. He said he better not catch me driving beasts, shooting to scare. That wasn’t any way to treat things, he said.

When we were jobless, we’d sit out under a tree somewhere. Dinner was usually cooked straight on the fire then— potatoes with a hard charcoal crust, fish we caught wrapped in leaves. Squash, if we could find it, and a baked apple thrown on the coals.

          After dinner, Jitney’d take off his hat and stretch out against the tree trunk, and sometimes he’d rustle up a story or two, or jokes he’d heard. Sooner or later we always fell to talking. There wasn’t much else to do. The smoke would die down, and you could begin to hear the crickets and beasts calling, if you were quiet. I’d get out the cards and we’d play. If it hadn’t darkened yet Jitney would have me get out a newspaper and read it. During the times we had work, there wasn’t much chance for me to show him my reading. As I got older, more often I seemed to know more written words than he did.

Sometimes the night turned into a nature lesson, with Jitney pointing out the names of certain beasts and having me tell him their habits.

 On the rare times when I asked him about me, he’d set off storytelling, until I’d forget the question nagging the back of my mind.

One night, I was toasting bread over the fire. I said, “If things was so good, how come my folks ain’t here?”

Jitney laid his bread down on his leg, and raised his eyebrows. “You want me to keep tellin’ this?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Go on.” I didn’t want to pester him, for fear he’d stop telling completely.

Jitney said shortly, “They had to leave you with me, boy,”

“But what happened to them? Did they have an accident?”

The hackles on my neck rose. Jitney was staring at me. He didn’t talk for a long time. He settled deeper into his spot under the tree. The fire flickered about his face like he was underwater. “Why do you think that, Slowpoke?” he said softly.

 His words came out in a funny way. They sounded just the same, but there was something hidden in them. I couldn’t understand it.

          Most times when we walked the land was the same: a sprawling stretch of fields or hills, with a patchwork of colors. There was usually a pile of rusty, discarded farm equipment in the fields, nesting in patches of dark green bottleneck gourds, or a shock of weathered, tough grass. There was milkweed plants, too, with bright purple blossoms, that were home to butterflies come summer. There was the crops, apple or walnut trees, strawberries and “cots” (apricots).

          I didn’t have no toys to speak of, at least not the bought kind. But there was butterflies and frogs to catch in the times we weren’t working. Jitney made whistles out of branches, and he could braid cattail reeds together and make crowns. We played in the creeks. Jitney give me a knife so’s I could make toys. So I could never see what Jitney meant when he said  “Someday I hope you’ll have better than this.”

          Once when I asked Jitney how many of us was hoboes, he waved away my counting fingers. “Might as well number the stars,”

          I didn’t know what he meant, and Jitney chuckled when I asked him which stars we were. He raised up his hand, pointed to two of the brighter ones, shining out like beacons.

          “Them two,” he said. He set off telling a story of the hoboes we knew. The fights they’d had and the people they’d met, and all of it mixed with the stars, like every single one of ‘em was riding the sky in a ball of light.

          Sometimes out on the road I’d ask him for the telling of the stars, but not often. I kept the telling of it inside me. One night we were low on food. Jitney didn’t say nothin’, just set there staring out at the trees.

          I don’t know why he give the stories to me, except as a kind of history to lean back on. A history of people mixed in with nature, like the older stories about tree spirits. There was magic in the forest, and I think there was magic too in Jitney. In weaving a history out of nothing, full of people to be kin to, when I had nothing. And maybe, with his telling it, Jitney hoped it would become true. That we’d have somewhere that we didn’t have to wander from. When I was little, I used to think of all them hoboes of Jitney’s, watching me, all made of stars, and it made me feel safer.

          That night I asked after the old stories, just to get him talking.

          He started out woodenly, and then he began to warm to it, and the tales of the stars rolled up and got swallowed by the sky.

          Everything was fine until the day come when there was riots agin in our camp. Townsfolk came sometimes, with guns, and burnt down the little makeshift huts. Riled because the pickers took their jobs. People were always killed. Jitney told me to stay inside the hut that night, but I was restless. I was thirteen by then, not so little, and I asked him to tell about me.

          Jitney waved it away. He was too busy looking out our little window to pay much attention to me. “Tell me why I’m with you,” I said. I scuffed my moccasins and pulled at a loose thread on my overalls, and still he wouldn’t answer. No stories at all.

          “Jitney,” I said, louder.

          “You know it already,” he said dully. “Your mama had a dress like the fire flames—“

          “No, I want real answers.”

          He looked at me. His eyes always looked like mirrors or water, but now they were dead. “No, Poke. I won’t do that.”

          He watched through the window agin. There was a dim hollow sound of shouting; a thin red something far down at the end of the houses, but I didn’t watch it. Jitney’s history. A history of fables, never the truth.

          “You’re not a bindlewalker at all,” I told him. That was like a code of honor with him, to have pride in the work we did. “I want to go home,” I hollered. I went out of the hut, running. I could see now what the noise was. The huts were burning, staves of wood falling around the people. Don’t ever drive beasts for fun. A stocky man with a torch in his hands ran by. He flung that down and caught me. I was fighting and cussing. He picked me up like a sack of grain. “Please, I want to go home,” I told him. A woman ran past with her face smoke-blackened, her eyes the only white part of her face. The man flung me down against the huts. People were screaming, trying to escape. They were crying like animals, and all around, the harsh voices and shouts of the townsfolk. I crouched by the side of one the huts, dazed. I had a bad cut down my face, and I wanted Jitney. But Jitney was gone. I kept still. I was prey in the tracking Jitney’d taught me. The last thing I remember I was watching burning splinters, fire dripping off the roof like water.

          When I woke up, someone was wiping the dirt off my face. It was Jitney, and he kept saying, “It’s all right, Slowpoke,”

          I sat up. My head hurt something awful. Jitney swore, and said he thought I was dead, laying with all the tore down huts. His voice was funny when he said it.

          “I didn’t mean to run out like that,” I was scared he’d just hop a train once he saw I was well.

          “It don’t matter,”

          “What about my parents,” I said. “You were gonna tell me.”

          Jitney’s eyes had that funny look about them. He nodded. His voice was serious now, not like when he told stories. “You were six when I met you, and you kept followin’ me along the rows while I picked. Yer daddy was awful to the whole passel of kids, hollerin’ and hittin’ all the time. You was the littlest one, an’ he hated you the most. One night I was out wanderin’, down—“ He swallowed. “—by the river, I seen him there— He was trying his level best to drown you, Poker. I hit ‘im a couple licks, and that got the whole camp out. They all agreed I could keep you. We been wanderin’ ever since.”

          I nodded. How much of our avoiding cops and jumping trains was because of that? Nobody would care about a dirty picker’s kid.

          “An’ now I suppose you’ll be wantin’ to go look for him, ain’t you?”

          “No,” I said hoarsely. “I don’t need to. I’m staying here.” Home was where Jitney was. I thought about Jitney making up history as he went, trying to give me something to be proud about. I wasn’t riled about it anymore.

          That was many years ago. We didn’t find a place to settle down until I was older. Still, we wandered, mainly because neither of us felt at home for long.

I kept things from that time: a bindle, and the knowledge that some people are empty, like the hollow stones Jitney said were good luck. Scuffed moccasins, a pocketknife, a battered cattail crown. Stars. These things might look useless to you; to me they were what made up the world… I can hear trains when nobody can.

          Jitney and me aren’t kin, but we’re bindlewalkers, and I reckon that’s close enough, ain’t it?

 

 

 

Corncob walked over to one of the littler kids, scooped them up, set them under a spigot, and began scrubbing vigorously at their hair. He turned off the water, released the kid, and chewed on his lip awhile. AIt=s our job to hate lawyers here. We=re raised up to hate >em. It=s lawyers put my dad away in jail. You want to stay for dinner?@

I thought about the witch woman in the little room, but it was growing dark, and I didn=t feel like walking all the way home.

 

 

 

Copyright Dawn Wood 9/11/2005

Long ago, Jitney told me, everyone was stars in the sky. When it come time for them to become people, they decided amongst themselves what they were going to be. There was a bunch of stars that said, “We will be the invisible people, and we will pick crops.” The others said they would light the way at night, for traveling. So the stars became pickers, and they were strong because they remembered what they had once been.

          Jitney was the storyteller, and informal doctor for our ditchbank camp in the 1930’s. He’d taken me when I was five, after my daddy left. Before he packed up, my daddy demanded my “white line money”: piecework wages. I hadn’t handed them over since I’d been staying with Jitney. My dad was blacklisted from all camps for abandoning family, the worst crime of all. It was Jitney I followed along the cotton rows and tried to imitate. He called me Slowpoke. He’d say, “This here’s my boy, Poker.”

          We didn’t have much. Cattail crowns, reed whistles, wooden toys, Jitney made them all mine, so I had something on the road. We both had the same clothes: worn plaid shirts, overalls, and homemade moccasins. The pack and bindle we carried stored everything. Oftentimes, we ate only because Jitney traded, or farmers give us culls, inferior crops, to eat.

Jitney was tall. He had big hands, quick at picking, and slow when he was doctoring. I was skinny and small, clumsy with my hands. I lost us money. I had brown, stringy hair that was always in my eyes. Jitney’s eyes were dark, but his hair was weathered from being beat by the wind. Our moccasins were scuffed and our clothes were wore out some, but everybody’s was the same, so it didn’t worry me like you’d think. Everybody forgot we weren’t related.

          Jitney taught me to read on one scarred table after another. We knew most folks wherever we traveled: Jitney was everyone’s doctor. The camp we lived in when I was thirteen was called Backofbeyond. The huts were 16 by 16, made of whatever we could find. There was a stove, bed and chair in each hut. By then, I had spent years watching Jitney heal, and he was letting me help with harder cases.

          Rhody Stevens was scrubbing her wash once, while Jitney was showing me different plants, telling stories about them so I would remember. She laughed. “Hold yer foolishness, Jitney,” she said, “You’ll fill the child’s head with stories.”

          Jitney held the plants, watching me. “God help me, Rhody,” he snapped. “It’s the best I can do!”

           I couldn’t imagine a world outside the camps, and figured I’d be picking cukes, cots, and apples for my whole life. Jitney sent me to school whenever he could. I told him stories about how good it was. I didn’t want him to know the teacher had us sit in the back. It was hard for 300 people to get water out of one rusty spigot, even for washing. Nobody teased Colleen Stevens, or her sister Mathy. Colly would fight anybody.

You had to bring a newspaper to school, and I didn’t have anything good. Those were new and cost money. I found the shabby remains of the last paper Jitney had. It was crinkled, and smelled of grease. I tried to read it the next day, squinting at the stained letters. I did fine with Jitney, but at school all the words turned to pebbles. I stammered them, with the paper swimming in front of my eyes. The kids chanted, “Maggie, maggie, migrant”, and I was shamed. It got real quiet. I looked up and Jitney was in the doorway. Jitney, in his battered hat, and faded overalls.

His moccasins slapped the ground. His mouth was set, but I couldn’t tell if he was angry. “Come on, Poke. We’re goin’ home.” Colly and Mathy left with us. My face burned. Jitney had never come to school.

“I told you not to come. Now everyone knows…”

          Jitney stopped walking and stared at me hard. “What d’they know, then?”

          “They know I don’t read right — don’t live proper— got funny clothes— they know why now too. Because they saw you,” I whispered. “An’ you look like me.”

           “Well,” he said harshly, “I was tryin’ to help you.” He walked away from me toward the fields. Everyone was still at work. I picked, leaving stems on the crop. We’d be docked for it, but Jitney didn’t say anything. When work was over I didn’t want to go home. I ran past folks carrying tired children with one hand, and battered lunch buckets in the other. Jitney didn’t chase after me. It was his fault for teaching me to read. The words got tangled in my mouth, coming out backwards. I couldn’t read a map, but I knew the RPMs of a motor. I didn’t understand directions at school, but I knew all the preparations of Jitney’s medicines. I stayed in the woods all day, listening to the frogs’ song, and wandering. When I came home that night, I figured he’d yell at me.

          There was food in a saucepan on the stove, hash, potatoes, and biscuits. He was eating silently at the table. He grunted when I came in.

          “It was my turn to cook,” I said.

          Jitney said quietly, “You were shamed of me today, weren’t you, Poke? We can pack up end of harvest. Get you another school.” He cleared his throat, “I want t’ help you, Poker. You can’t go dreamin’ someone else up who don’t look like me, ‘cause I’m it, boy.”

           I wanted to tell him folks at home knew me as the healer’s son, a fox-boy who could take any shape. Some were scared of me. The kids at school knew I was a migrant, and hated me. He thought he could fix everything.

          I stammered, “I didn’t mean what I said…”

          “Leave that,” Jitney said. He got up from the table, and hunted for his fiddle under the bed. Then he sat down, humming and tuning strings. It was like nothing at all had happened. But we both knew something had.

          “Dance tomorrow?”

          He nodded. “There’s ways to be smart without readin’. Work with yer hands. I want you out of here. I’m stuck. You ain’t.”

           I didn’t answer him. I crawled into bed, and I heard him playing “Old Jimmy Sutton”. I knew the words from a long time ago. “Old Sal come a-kickin’. I keep Sal all the time pickin’…”

          Next day I left the dance early, and had Colleen stand guard. Jitney said once Rhody used to have a whistle but none of us had seen it. I found it easily, hidden behind the stove. When I told Rhody I’d like to see her play, her eyes got teary, but she smiled. It was noisy at the dance, and at first, we couldn’t hear her. Then Jitney come up, his fiddle under one arm. I followed him outside, and he hissed at me, “You brought that to her! Why, Poker?”

I told him I’d never heard her play. He asked did I remember Rhody’s sister, Matilda, the one Mathy took after? She give Rhody that whistle, and died because the hospital wouldn’t take her. “It was a family matter. It was hers to hide.”

“I wanted to help,” Colly and Mathy gathered round as the tunes flowed. Behind them, folks danced jigs to the banjo and harmonica. “I think I did. I’m family.”

          Jitney sighed. “You need to find yer place here. Balance the maggie and townie worlds, but mind I don’t cotton to a thief.” I nodded, and he touched the back of my head, grinning. After a minute, he went back to his fiddling, and everyone clapped and sang along: “Chickens a-crowing on Sourwood Mountain, so many pretty girls I can’t count ‘em…”

When dancing was over, I swam with Colly in the irrigation ditch. The water there was milky gray, and you could see all Bugaby Yawn, the huts hegglety-pegglety along the water’s edge, as though they were grown from the earth.

 Jitney found his place raising me. People called me the Least’un, because I was the only family Jitney had, a rarity where extra hands were vital. I had nightmares, and it didn’t matter then if Jitney was riled at me. He’d walk with me round the camp till I stopped shaking. People said that was why I was a fox, because I roamed at night. Jitney got tetchy when they said that.

One day, he told me he was leaving. “There’s better money down the road,” he said. He was already taking things off the shelves, and it struck me sudden that it didn’t take much to make our home look like we’d never lived there at all. The bare wooden walls were thin and brittle looking without our tins of food and hats hanging above the stove. He’d always taken me before, and I was afraid.

“Rhody’ll take care of you,” he said. I stared at him, numbly. He was already giving me to somebody else. “Poker, I’ll come back. Promise. You have school. We need more money now. Look, buddy, I claim you as kin.” Kin… He could get anybody to help him. He didn’t need me with my clumsiness and stumbling tongue.

Jitney was moving fast, like he did when he wanted to get a job done. He stopped for a minute and reached over to touch my arm, but I stumbled away from him. “You’re leaving without me,” I said. I didn’t see him go, but I came back to stare at the place where my hat hung by itself, until Rhody  called me.

Jitney came back two months later. I saw him first, raising the dust up off the road, whistling. He grinned widely.

          “Hh–eey now,” he said, giving me a hug. “Ain’t that somebody I know? Rhody take care of you?” He took the lard tin where we kept our money out of his pack and rattled it. It rang with coins.

          “Mathy talks now,” I said. I wanted to help him carry something.

 “You’ve grown some,” He gave me the tin. “Hold it careful. So Mathy talks, does she? Shame I missed that.”

          Colleen and Mathy came running. Jitney scooped Mathy up with one hand. “I mith yer thtories, Jitney,” she said. She stuck her thumb back in her mouth.

          Finally, Jitney had to drop his pack and bindle. There were children swinging from his arms and legs.

          “Rhody,” he bellowed, “come get these kids off me, will you?”

          “It’s yer own fault,” Rhody growled back. The whistle hung round her neck, and her hair was held back with a bandanna. Her weather-beat face was smiling.

           After the laughing outside was done, I helped him unpack. “I’m really tired, Poke,” he said. “I worked hard, an’ I lost the job anyway.”  I wondered why he hadn’t said that to all them outside.

          “You have money, right? You said so.”

           He tapped my shoulder. “Sure. It’ll last about six weeks.”

          I rambled with excitement and pride. “I’ll get a job next, Jitney. I can do anything…” I tossed a spare shirt on the lug boxes we used for shelves, and put the frying pan back its place. The blank spaces on the walls began to fill in. “I can pick a hundred boxes a day, even with the ones I drop. I know how to cook for myself. I’m big enough now the bosses won’t bother me…”

His eyes narrowed, and he said sharply, “No, stay where you’re safe. Yer just a kid.”

          “ I’ll be fine.” I bounced on the bed. Up and down, to the rhythm of a song I heard inside me. Jitney was home. “Nobody’s gonna play me for a fool. I’ll work so good they won’t want to. You’ll see. I’ll be fine —“

          “You need to be able to read to sign a contract,” Jitney shouted suddenly. I almost fell off the bed, mid-bounce. His eyes were stony-gray, looking through me. “Or they’ll cheat you. The same thing’ll happen to you that happened to me, an’ you’ll be stuck here forever. Ye understand?”

          I was silent. Something told me this is when people get rid of you. This is what your nightmares are. I kept shaking. Jitney never yelled like that. Nothing much scares me. Cat tractors can be right behind me in the field, and bosses can be threatening my life if I don’t pick cleaner, but it doesn’t scare me.

 “Godammit, kid, I want you to make something of yerself, an’ all you want t’do is pick…” He stopped. I waited for him to leave and not come back. Instead, he came over and sat down by me. His face relaxed.

          I said dully, “ I don’t need readin’. I’m not yer kin, so nobody’ll blame you if I leave. You can get yerself somebody who’s what you want ‘em to be. Somebody other’n me.”

          Jitney moved easy, like he did when people was hurt. “Slowpoke, why d’ye think you come here when you was little?”

          “Wages.” I whispered. Jitney’d never really scared me before. He was careful not to.

          “No.” Jitney fiddled with his hands. “Yer daddy was mean. It had nothin’ t’do with money. I would’ve taken you anyway, come end of harvest. It was a bad place for you…You’re bright, Slowpoke. Yer a great help t’ me.”

           I told everything about school then. I mixed up left and right. I was only smart at home, where smartness wasn’t measured with schooling.  Of course, he’d known about it a long time.

          “You have to go,” he said. “ I’m sorry. I got no right yelling at you about that…You helped Rhody…Yer great with them herbs.”

          I felt small. He said I was helpful, but all I did was remember the dosages. I told stories to patients. I wasn’t like him. He’d even given me my name. Slowpoke, a cull name…

“You goin’ away agin?”

          “Not for awhile. We have enough.” He grinned. “You like t’help folks, Poker?”

          I nodded. He said, “I shouldn’t’ve worried. You’ll find yerself a way out without readin’, if you have to.”

          I mumbled a question. I lost us money, and most folks would’ve gotten rid of me for that. He said roughly, “I never been shamed of you.” None of that mattered to him.

We went outside then, watching the sun cut across the camp, dancing on the huts of throwaway things. Wood, tin and cardboard, down by the river where no one ever went. And that was how I found my place. I stayed with Jitney, where I had family. Later, when I was grown, I left, and became a doctor. And it happened long ago, in Bugaby Yawn, after the time when the people were stars.

         

 

 

          .

 

Copyright Dawn Wood 1987,

 

Trish Hernandez lived in an ordinary town, on a ordinary street, in an ordinary house. In fact, nothing EXORIDNARY had ever happened there, except for the time the postman came over with his face bright green, and even then he didn’t want to explain what happened, no matter how many times Trish asked him. No, there were no fairies nesting in the roof or gnomes in the garden — (Trish looked) — everything was always going to school, and playing tag and jump rope. Which was just fine with Trish, because that’s the way it always was.

Until the day Trish’s mother asked her to clean her room.

This may seem like an oridnary request to you, but to Trish, it seemed enormous.

Her room was a mess. It was the only exordinary thing about her. It was a maze of string and basketballs and lost socks and pickup sticks and fifty-six old birthday cards. Trish dreaded the thought of tiptoing anywhere but to her bed, for fear some old sock might drag her down some night and gobble her up.

“NO,” Trish said. “I DON’T WANT TO.”

Now, THAT, you might say, is a very ordinary thing to say. You may have said it several times yourself, but for Trish it started an adventure.

She began to feel dizzy and thirsty. The room seemed to grow larger. There was suddenly a forest of spiky things in front of her. They were gray and hard to push through. Her mother was nowhere at all.

Then Trish heard her. Her mother’s face loomed in front of her, as large as a building.

“You see what happens,” her mother was saying, “I knew this would happen someday! You’ve shrunk!”

Trish realized then that the spiky things were carpet. Her mother, she thought, was taking this all rather well.

 

Pretty soon, Trish was hungry. Her mother fed her baby food.

“I don’t LIKE mashed peas!” said Trish.

“You must eat your veggies,” said her mother.

Trish sat in a little chair her father had made for her. It was right next to the salt and pepper shakers on the table, which had a great view except for making Trish sneeze all the time. The chair was short and made of splintered wood and metal. It was between a quarter inch and a half inch high.

“Mom, can I please have a drink of water?”

“Yes, you may,” said her mother. “Uh-oh, I’ll have to tape up a thimble.” When the thimble was ready, Trish drank. Then she sat on her mother’s hand so she could travel to the computer.

The computer keys were so big Trish had to JUMP on them. It was like being at the fair, except better. Her Dad had told her about Newtland, a place where giant salamanders lived, but Trish had never been there. It wasn’t on the globe at school.

So she typed “Newtland” into the computer.

Trish saw a flash of light and the disk in the computer jumped out and played rock music and talked. It had small cartoon eyes and a mouth too. Trish had never noticed this when she was big, but she guessed strange things like this were going to happen. The disk glided over. She clung to its back. It was headed for a large black cave.

“It’s the disk drive!” said Trish.

And then she was in the computer.

The disk went on the screen, jumping from letter to letter with Trish on its back. There were newts all over, blinking their green eyes and squeaking. The disk plucked a few newts up and went back through the disk drive.

Pretty soon, newts were all over the house.

“There are newts ALL OVER!” said her mother.

Trish went outside to get away from the newts. It had gotten very crowded in the house.

 She walked along the brick border of the flowerbeds. Her dad was trying to water the garden. The hose was plugged up. It only sucked in air.

Then it sucked up Trish.

She felt the hose moving. Her dad always put it away in the garage. It was very dark in the garage. Trish could no longer see the light at the end of the hose. She tried to call the newts, climbing up the hose. She knew that when she reached the end of the curvy wound up hose, she would empty out into the pipes that led to the basement.

She took hold of a rusty railing – the seam where the hose had been put together – and slid down the hose.

“This is disgusting,” said Trish.

She slid down the hose until she reached the nozzle and landed on to of a mountain of soft dirt. Trish sank, fighting with the dirt.

There was a pipe in front of her. Trish climbed up it, straight into the toilet. She called for her mother.

“Well, well,” said her mother, crossing her arms, “just look at the state of your clothes. I don’t know why you have to come home so dirty.”

Her mother got a hanger for Trish to hang on to, but accidently hit the flush lever.

SWOOSH! Trish was pulled away by the water, deep into more pipes. She held on as hard as she could to the edge of the pipe. There was another pipe in front of her, and she climbed this one. She was wet and cold – and hungry again.

Trish came up in the sink. She could hear her mom and dad’s voices perfectly.

Her dad was saying, “Why isn’t Trish here anymore?”

“I think you met her when you turned on the hose. Did you realize that you didn’t water my plants? My prize winning ferns are all wilting. Really, Henry, how could you be so careless? You sucked her right up the hose.”

Inside the pipe, Trish laughed. She rolled down the pipe the way you roll down a hill. Then she decided to go on a journey.

Trish made her way out of the pipes, back into the disk drive. She stayed there two years, playing with the newts. Trish found a job as a cursor for a writer program, jumping from letter to letter. She had to pull each letter after her and make sure the A’s and M’s stood up straight. It was hard work. At night, she looked at the stars made from the air holes in back of the computer, until the computer was turned off for the night. Then the stars were gone, but Trish didn’t mind. She slid down wires and rode little engines like elevators and talked with the ants who crawled about. And of course, the giant salamanders who were always around.

But one day, she looked out the computer screen and saw her shadow. It had been so long since she’d had a shadow she had forgotten what it looked like. She thought, “If I could trade places with my shadow when it’s big, I would be big.” The computer was in front of the window, and so Trish waited for just the right time, until the sun shone through just right. Then she jumped.

Her shadow was so surprised, it jumped too. Now Trish was big again.

 

 

Daddy=s lip curled, but then he grinned slightly. AYessir,@ he said. AI believe I do.@

Mr. Lyte took out a pile of bills, peeled off a handful and handed them to Daddy. ATake your wages and get off my land,@

He said it without any shouting at all. It was really funny, because everyone said thank you to him on our way toward home, and I can=t figure why.

Rhody was sniveling because she wouldn=t get to marry Robbie. Joey was whistling. Right away my mother set to packing for the trip, and Daddy helped her. And the next day, when we went to the store for food to eat on the trip, Daddy give me eighteen bills for the storekeeper. I have a green boughten coat with brass buttons and a turned up collar. It=s all I wanted, a boughten coat.